The Last Grain Race

My first  (and toughest) encounter with physical labor didn't come my way until I was 20 years old.  (A few days per summer picking strawberries doesn't count, nor does the summer I was 19, working in an airconditioned laboratory performing chemical analyses.)  I was working in the "wet end" of a paper mill, doing tedious, dirty, and disgusting work, the sort of work that was avoided, if possible, by regular employees.

Filled with horror, I felt life was demanding too much of me, requiring me to do mindless and exhausting work for a full three months, before returning to my idyllic life on a beautiful campus. 

Eric Newby was a middle class boy from London, educated at prestigious St. Paul School, who had been fascinated by stories of sea adventure since childhood.  In 1938, at the age of 18, he signed on as an apprentice on the Finnish four-masted windjammer Moshulu, agreeing to remain with the ship as it carried ballast from Belfast to Port Victoria, South Australia, where it dumped its ballast and picked up a full load of Australian grain, and to stay with it until it returned with its cargo (by way of the Pacific) to Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland.  His father paid a £50 deposit (about £3,400 in today's money) to ensure his son's completion of his contract, and signed with reluctance the indenture agreement (at 18, his son was a minor), to be interpreted under Finnish law.

I remember that he was particularly concerned to find out whether the death penalty was still enforced and in what manner it was carried out.

Newby nervously boarded the ship dressed in street clothes, and reported to the Second Mate near the main mast.  The Second Mate looked him over, and asked if he'd ever been aloft on a sailing ship before.  "No," Eric allowed.  "Op you go then."  Impatiently the Second Mate refused to give Eric time to change from his slippery street shoes.

At 130 feet, he reached the topsail yard.

I stood gingerly on the this slippery construction; the soles of my shoes were like glass; all Belfast spread out below.  I looked between my legs down to a deck as thin as a ruler and nearly fell from sheer funk.

But he was far from done.  "Op to the royal yard," the Mate yelled.  At about 160 feet, he reached the top yardarm.  "Out on the yard!" came the cry.  He edged out on a line that ran along the yardarm, and looked down  "What I saw was very impressive and disagreeable."   The Mate summoned him back to the mast, where he was told to shimmy up the remaining height of the mast.  He reached the top of the main mast at 198 feet.

Since that day I have been aloft in high rigging many hundreds of times and in every kind of weather but I still get that cold feeling in the pit of the stomach when I think of the first morning out on the royal yard with the sheds of the York Dock below.

As someone who, not much younger than Eric Newby, froze on the gently-sloped  roof of our family home while doing some sort of maintenance work, and had to be carefully guided down to the ladder, my blood curdled reading of this initiation to Newby's eight months at sea.  I felt less cowardly when a friend, to whom I was describing the voyage, admitted, "I just couldn't handle it."

The rest of the story is hardly anticlimax:  The length of time it took just to find the right winds to break free of the Irish sea.  The long sail to reach the Cape of Good Hope, using prevailing winds to first sail almost to Brazil.  The frightening seas during the long period of isolation crossing the South Pacific.  Rounding Cape Horn.  And the horrific storm the ship survived in the South Atlantic.

Although the arc of the story will appeal to everyone, the details will be most appealing to those who have some experience sailing, if even only a small pleasure craft.  Newby, to a large extent, assumes a knowledge of the terminology one uses to describe the myriad sails used on a four-masted ship, and the mechanics of raising and lowering them.  (Not done, for the most part, with the help of mechanization.  Men were required high in the rigging on virtually a daily basis.)  Also, Newby was one of the few men on the ship who spoke English.  He joins the reader in his own confusion by his constant quotation of Finnish (or often Swedish) commands, insults, and daily conversation.  The more critical dialogue he translates, but much of the remainder can be guessed only from the context.

The "Race" of the title refers to an unofficial contest between the sailing ships --  all of which sailed at approximately the same time, presumably because of the available winds and/or the availability of the Australian grain cargo -- to make the fastest return trip from Australia.  The effect of the drama will not be spoiled if I tell you that the Moshulu, sailing under its tyrannical and single-minded captain, won easily.

After reading this book, I doubt if you'll mind having missed the opportunity of signing on as a sailing vessel apprentice.  But you may well feel that we all have lost something in no longer caring about the great ocean currents that move the seas, and the strong prevailing winds -- and especially the trade winds -- on whose consistency a successful voyage depended absolutely until the last century.

A book of hardship, rough companionship, and good humor -- and a healthy dose of historical technical data on how to manage a tall ship.

At the end of the sail, the captain asked Newby, "Coming again?  … Make a man of you next time"

"I'll think it over," he answered.  He didn't.  Once he left the Moshulu, he never saw the ship or its crew again.