Racundra's First Cruise Read online

  156

  A ROOGÖ WINDMILL

  160

  SHIPS THAT PASS

  166

  OUR NEIGHBOUR AT SPITHAMN

  174

  TWO SMALL SAILORS WITH A MODEL OF HER

  174

  HAPSAL JETTY (SHOWING LEADING BEACONS)

  182

  DRYING OUT

  182

  “RACUNDRA” AT HELTERMAA (DAGÖ ISLAND)

  192

  “TOLEDO” OF LEITH

  198

  INHABITANTS OF MOON

  198

  A HOUSE ON MOON

  204

  THE GATES OF MOON

  208

  THE OLD RUSSIAN INN AT KUIVAST

  212

  THE NEW HARBOUR AT WERDER

  216

  THE NEW LIGHTHOUSE AT WERDER

  218

  SEAL-HUNTERS, THEIR BOAT AND SHIP

  226

  THE SEAL-HUNTERS ON BOARD THEIR SHIP

  226

  “RACUNDRA” HAULED OUT

  236

  “RACUNDRA’S” FIRST

  CRUISE

  THE BUILDING OF “RACUNDRA”

  HOUSES are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.

  It is for that reason, perhaps, that, when it comes, the desire to build a boat is one of those that cannot be resisted. It begins as a little cloud on a serene horizon. It ends by covering the whole sky, so that you can think of nothing else. You must build to regain your freedom. And always you comfort yourself with the thought that yours will be the perfect boat, the boat that you may search the harbours of the world for and not find.

  That is the story of Racundra. Years of planning went into her before ever a line was drawn on paper. She was to be a cruising boat that one man could manage if need be, but on which three could live comfortably. She was to have writing-table and bookcase, a place for a typewriter, broad bunks where a man might lay him down and rest without braising knee and elbow with each unconsidered movement. She was to carry her dinghy on deck to avoid that troublesome business of towing, which has brought so many good dinghies to their latter end. She should not be fast, but she should be fit to keep the sea when other little boats were scuttling for shelter. In fact, she was to be the boat that every man would wish who likes to move from port to port – a little ship in which, in temperate climates, a man might live from year’s end to year’s end.

  “RACUNDRA” ON THE STOCKS.

  “RACUNDRA” LAUNCHED.

  Then came friendship with a designer, the best designer in the Baltic, whose racing boats carried away prize after prize in the old days before the war, whose little cruisers put to sea when steamers stayed in port. And after that Racundra began to exist on paper. There were the lines of that stout nose of hers, of that stern, like the sterns of the Norwegian pilot cutters. On paper, I could sit at the writing-table a full yard square, in the cabin where (the measurements proved it) I could stand up and walk about with unbruised head. On paper was that little cockpit where one man, sitting alone, could control the little ship as she made her steady way over the waters. Then came the sail-plan, after how many alterations; a snug rig; you could reach the end of the mizen boom from the deck and there was no bowsprit. The size of the mizen was such that you could keep the sea and keep up to the wind with mizen and foresail alone. The balance of the sails was such (again on paper) that if you wished you could sail under mainsail only, or under main and mizen, so that you could take down your staysail before coming into port and so have a clear deck for playing with warps and anchor chain. Racundra, on paper, grew in virtue daily.

  It had come to such a pass that I woke from dreams at night sitting in that paper cockpit, with a paper tiller under my arm, steering a paper ship across uncharted seas. Racundra had to be built. There was no escape. But my friend the designer, Otto Eggers, lived in Reval, and since the war had had no yard, or he would have built her himself, since the two years of paper boat-building had made him share my madness. But there was no help for it. He could not build. I had to build somewhere else, and, since I was to be in Riga, came to terms with a Riga builder.

  I pass over as briefly as I may the wretched story of the building and the hundred journeys over the ice to the little shed in which Racundra slowly turned from dream into reality. She was to have been finished in April. She was promised to me on May 1st, May 15th, May 20th and at short intervals thenceforward. She was launched, a mere hull, on July 28th. I went for the hundred and first time to the yard and found Racundra in the water. The Lettish workmen by trickery got the builder and me close together, planted us suddenly on a wooden bench which they had decked with beanflowers stolen from a neighbouring garden and lifted us, full of mutual hatred, shoulder high. The ship was launched. Yes, but the summer was over, and there had been whole weeks when Racundra had not progressed at all while the builder and his men did other work He promised then that she should be ready to put to sea on August 3rd. She was not. On August 5th I went to the yard and took away the boat unfinished. Not a sail was setting properly. There were no cleats fixed. The centreboard was half up, half down and firmly stuck. But, under power and sails, somehow or other, I got the ship away and took her round to the lake, had her out on the Yacht Club slip, removed the centreboard, had a new one built, re-launched her, and just over a fortnight later turned the carpenters out of her and put to sea.

  But there is no use in reminding myself now of those miserable angry months of waiting, in remembering the lacquer that was not put on, the ungalvanized nails that I had laboriously to remove from the cabin work and replace with brass screws. The hull of Racundra was right enough, and, by the time we had finished with her, we had put right the lesser matters that were wrong. Fools build and wise men buy. Well, I shall never build again, and in all probability shall never have money enough to buy. Nor shall I have need. For Racundra turned out to be all that I had hoped. We took her to sea in the Baltic autumn; we had her at sea when big steamers reported damage from the heavy weather, and never for a minute did she show the smallest sign of disquiet. Weather that was good enough for us was good enough for her, and, when the Equinox flung her home with a last flick of his mighty tail, she sailed through the rollers on the bar and up the troubled Dvina, demure, serene, neat, as if she were returning from a day’s trip in June.

  For those who are interested in such things, there is a detailed description of Racundra at the end of this book. Here it is enough to say that she is a centreboard ketch just under thirty feet long with a small auxiliary motor. It is a five-horsepower motor, but, possibly on account of my inexperience, it seemed to need forty horsepower to start it, for which reason I did not use it at all during the voyage.

  THE CREW

  AND now for the crew. There were three of us. There was the Cook, to whom, I think, is due most of the credit for the ease and pleasantness of our voyage. She can take her trick at the tiller if need be, but that, for her, is holiday. All the hard work was hers. She cooked a meal. It was eaten. She washed up and, just as the dry dishes reached the rack, one or other of that hungry company would inquire whether or no the time for the next meal was drawing near. She cooked another meal. As its last remains were cleared away, as sure as fate she would catch the eye of one or other of us looking hungrily at the clock. We, of course, navigating, sailing, had our strenuous moments, after which would follow long hours of plain and easy steering. She, on the other hand, thanks to our appetites, became a sort of juggler, keeping plates, cups, saucepans, kettles, teapot, coffee-pot, thermos flasks and Primuses in a whirl of perpetual moti
on. We, in harbour, idled, fished, and watched the barometer and the weather, sustaining our self-respect by oracular utterance. She, in harbour as at sea, never for a moment was able to give those pots and pans a rest. She might have been dancing on swords and juggling with knives where an instant’s pause meant death. We saw her throughout the day in a cloud of cooking, and the steersman at night, looking down the companion, saw always busy hands cleaning obstinate aluminium, and he who rested on his bunk heard, as he turned in comfortable sleep, the chink of crockery and the splash of washing up. The Primuses roared continually, like the blast furnaces in northern England. And we, relentless and without shame, called continually for food. Of the three of us, the Cook, without a doubt, was the one who worked her passage.

  The second of us was the Ancient Mariner. On the Stint See at Riga was a tiny harbour for small boats, where during the long months of waiting for Racundra I had kept my dinghy. There, in a little wooden but on a raft, lived an old seaman, the harbourmaster of this Lilliput port. On my first coming he had spoken a few words of English. Gradually, day by day, the language came back to him, and with the language memories of a life he had almost forgotten. Many, many years ago he had sailed from Southampton in the famous Sunbeam of Lord Brassey. He had spent fifteen years of his youth in Australia. He had shared in the glorious runs of the old tea clippers. He had been a seaman in the Thermopylae, which he called the Demooply, and had raced in her against the Kutuzak, in which odd Russianized name I recognized the Cutty Sark. And now he was taking care of ten-foot dinghies, and every morning made a voyage across the lake in a rowing-boat with a leg-of-mutton sail to bring the milk from a farm on the other side. He took care of my sailing dinghy as if she had been an ocean liner, made her a padded wharf to preserve her varnish, and spoke of her quick passages across the little lake as if she were a clipper returning round the Horn. He and I became friends, and long before Racundra was finished, knowing that I had planned a voyage to England, he went to see her in her shed and, returning, begged me to take him with me. “I am an old man,” he said, “and I should like once more to go to sea before it is too late.” And I, of course, agreed with joy, for there is no such rigger in the Baltic as the Ancient Mariner who has known what it was to sail in the Thermopylae in the days of her pride.

  Then, as the months passed, and we knew that the builder had made the English voyage impossible this year, it was decided that he should come with Racundra on her first cruise. He spoke of Racundra always as “our ship”, and, as we sailed, his ambitions for her grew with every day. “When we are in the Mediterranean,” he would say, “we must make a canvas double roof for the cabin or it will be too hot in there.” And then, “She’ll find the long waves of the Atlantic child’s play after this. It won’t be till she is near the American coast that she’ll have anything as bad.” He, that Ancient Mariner, was on this miniature cruise as happy as a boy. Nothing would make him leave the ship. He never went ashore, except in Helsingfors to look for a particular size of sailmaker’s needles, unobtainable in Riga, and in smaller ports to bring water to refill our casks. “Shore,” he would say, “I have enough of shore at home.” He was a very little man, with a white beard and a head as bald as my own. Sometimes on board he wore a crimson stocking-cap with a tassel, when he looked like a gnome, a pixy or a fairy cobbler. If Queen Mab went to sea she could not find a fitter mariner.

  The third of us was Racundra’s “master and owner”, who writes these words even now with the swelling pride that he felt when he first saw them on the ship’s papers handed to him on departure by the Lettish Customs Office. “Master and Owner of the Racundra.” Does any man need a prouder title or description? In moments of humiliation, those are the words that I shall whisper to myself for comfort. I ask no others on my grave.

  THE START

  ON August 19th I got rid of the carpenters, near ten o’clock in the evening, and spent the better part of the night in clearing overboard the mess they had left behind them. A good deal of the mess they had, after the manner of carpenters, built into the boat, and I shall not be able to get rid of it until during the winter I undo much of the work they did. Much of the work they were supposed to do they had not done, but I had suffered enough from them, and learnt that they were prepared to work for another two years on the boat if I should allow them. If only to save her from them I had to put to sea. The inside of the boat was unpainted, except that I had slapped a single coat over the cabin walls and cupboards, doing one side first and, when that was dry, shifting all the litter across the cabin and painting the other side. An incredible amount remained to be done. But it was already very late for cruising in these parts, and the last of the yachts that had left Riga for summer voyages had returned for the winter before ever we left that little harbour in the lake. So, though locks did not work, though there were no fastenings to the forehatch and none to the companion-way, though forecastle and kitchen were still raw unpainted wood, though cleats were lying about not yet fastened into the decks, though we had only half a dozen blocks worthy of the name, the rest being the clumsiest makeshifts, we knew that if we did not start at once we should not start till next year. We three looked her all over and decided to get away anyhow and finish things up on the voyage.

  I slept in Racundra that night, as I had done for the last two weeks, but for the first time slept in a cabin not half full of shavings and carpenters’ tools. At 5.30 in the morning of August 20th I jumped overboard for the last time in the Stint See and swam round Racundra as usual while porridge was cooking on the Primus. An hour later the Ancient Mariner came on board, followed presently by the Cook. The wind was N.W., and we were able to slip with it out of the little harbour and reach the whole way down the lake to the entrance to the Mühlgraben, which connects the lake with the Dvina River. There was not much wind, and we had time to screw in the cleats for the staysail sheets before we had any tacking to do. All three sails were setting abominably, as we had no battens for them, the builder having failed us. I had decided to make the trip to Reval without them, knowing that I could there get them properly made.

  THE ANCIENT MARINER AT THE TILLER.

  FIRST SIGHT OF LAND (RUNÖ ISLAND).

  The entrance to the Mühlgraben is narrow, and in tacking through it, Racundra refused to stay and ran her centreboard into the mud. We got off, however, by pulling the board up a few inches, after which there were no more shallows, and we crawled very slowly from side to side between the canal wharves and the balks on the other side which cage a sea of floating timbers. A British steamship, the Baltabor, was loading in the Mühlgraben, and Captain Whalley, who has known Racundra from her birth, since he visited her in the builder’s shed, was on the bridge as we struggled by. The Ancient and I had agreed that two leads were unnecessary, and had therefore each left his own lead at home, so I hailed Whalley as we passed and begged the loan of a five-pounder. Racundra went on, zigzagging obstinately through the narrow canal, while I tumbled into the dinghy and dropped back and hung on to Baltabor’s ladder while the lead was found and lowered away to me. We should often have been in a sore pickle without it.

  I thought we should probably be all day getting through the Customs at the far end of Mühlgraben, and therefore asked Captain Whalley to luncheon on the Racundra; and he, who accepted, must afterwards have had the blackest thoughts of me, for, as it turned out, we were held up for only half an hour, and decided to work on to the Winter Harbour at the mouth of the Dvina, hoping to make our peace with Whalley when we should meet him in Reval, where the Baltabor was to call.

  The Customs House at Mühlgraben is a little yellow wooden building, with flowers in the window and a wicket-gate in a wooden paling on the quay. It stands at the corner where the Red Dvina joins the Mühlgraben, and we let go anchor off it, on the windward side of the channel. I hurriedly discarded my disreputables and put on creased trousers and newly pipe-clayed shoes, in order to make up as far as I could for the “un-yachty” appearance of Racundra, a trai
t of hers which is normally our joy, but is likely to increase the difficulty of dealing with officials. Racundra lay there, a regular little ship, “a proper contrabandist”, as she has been described, looking, with her ochre topsides and sharp stern, exactly like any one of a hundred Baltic smugglers, while her “owner and master” paddled himself ashore in the very neatest of new varnished dinghies, looking as idly rich as he was in reality busy and poor. It was ten o’clock precisely, and as I had given this time in arranging yesterday with the Chief Customs Office in Riga, I felt our punctuality as a sort of moral pipe-clay and, papers in hand, tapped at the door of the little yellow house with a most satisfactory confidence. I found there a charming young man who talked English and gave me a certificate of clearance without any fuss. He rang up the dock police on the telephone. A harbour policeman, together with a Customs officer from the town, had arrived as the clock was striking, and, everybody being delighted by his own and everybody else’s punctuality (the rarest of all things in Eastern Europe), and this being the first occasion on which a foreign-going yacht had been cleared here, passports were stamped in two minutes, another certificate added to the first, after which all three officials left the little wooden house with me, to visit Racundra and, by drinking vodka on board, to fulfil the last formalities.

  When they saw my dinghy swinging like a nutshell below the lofty wooden landing-stage, they refused emphatically to travel in her, wrongly thinking that she could carry only one. They took a boat of their own, and I rowed off as hard as I could and got a bottle of vodka open and mugs on the cabin table before they arrived. We gave them bread and butter, ham and vodka, and they gave us good wishes and the completest freedom from the red tape in which, had they chosen, they could have tangled us as spiders tangle flies. Twenty minutes after our first arrival, they were pushing off again and we were free, our papers stamped, Racundra cleared for foreign parts and already, as it were, abroad.