At some time towards the end of the eighties he had made a voyage from Calcutta to London in a clipper ship which carried skysails above the royals. His description of sitting astride the skysail yard, which was as thin as a broomstick and shook violently, filled me with apprehension. He had shipped as a passenger, lived aft and had had leisure for reading and speculation. His reminiscences were to prove highly misleading.
The study where he worked was extraordinary, and nothing like it can conceivably have existed outside the British Museum and those sections of the Royal College of Surgeons not accessible to the general public. On the wall facing the door was the longest muzzle-loading punt gun I had ever seen. Below it was a smaller model. Mr Mountstewart was a Fen man and still occasionally discharged this piece from a specially strengthened canoe. Both punt guns hung close up to the ceiling, I suspect, because they were loaded. Beneath them a shark’s head, its jaws agape, protruded from the wall. Next door was the bathroom; sometimes when I called, Mr Mountstewart would be having a bath, and the sounds coming from it made me think that it was the invisible hind parts of the shark happily threshing the water.
On the back of the door hung a spiked pickelhaube from a volunteer regiment that Mr Mountstewart had joined in some sudden emergency. On one side it was flanked by a narwhal’s tusk and on the other by the sword of a swordfish.
To the left of the door over the fireplace was an oil-painting of the skysail yarder outside Foochow. She was shown with her ports painted black and white, which according to him was supposed to discourage piracy in the China Sea. The picture was by a Chinese artist whose imagination had overburdened the vessel with canvas.
For the rest the room contained a fantastic medley; faded photographs of early submarines at Spithead and the first turbine vessel Turbina, filled with apprehensive-looking men in bowler hats roaring through a crowded anchorage; assegais and knobkerries; devil masks and kris; Martini-Henry rifles and bandoliers of soft-nosed bullets.
In a recess stood a large bookcase, the top shelf filled with bottles containing nasty things in pickle, including a foetus, of what species I never dared to ask, only hoping it wasn’t human. The second shelf contained a quantity of Nobel explosive and, within dangerous proximity, an electric exploder. The shelves below were filled with books of travel, charts, maps and text-books which instructed you how to behave in the most difficult circumstances. One of these, a work on first aid in extremis, contained the account of a North American trapper successfully amputating his leg with a bowie knife after an affray with Red Indians. It also contained instructions for setting a broken collar bone by hurling yourself backwards off a rock.
Near the window, in a polished brass shell-case of a Gatling gun, stood a sheaf of large rockets with metal sticks which served the same decorative purpose as the Pampas grass in the front window of the next house. One Fifth of November Mr Mountstewart had appeared in our garden by Hammersmith Bridge with a number of these rockets which he fired off in series in the direction of the poorer and more inflammable parts of Fulham. They had disappeared into the night with a satisfying scream, and I am quite certain did a large amount of damage. Mr Mountstewart always maintained they were life-saving rockets but it is more probable that they had been constructed for offensive purposes at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
The following year he appeared with a spherical object called a Gerb which he insisted was a firework. The bomb, for that is what it proved to be, was lowered into a thick iron mortar which was supposed to be deeply embedded in the earth. Unfortunately, this was not carried out properly, as the gardens were the common property of the flats in which we lived and it was felt that the grass would be damaged. It would have been cheaper to damage the grass. The initial explosion jerked the mouth of the mortar into an upright position, and instead of going over the river the Gerb, like its modern counterpart the V-2, shot vertically into the air with increasing velocity. At eighty feet it should have exploded, but it failed to do so and began to descend on us with a tremendous whining sound. In spite of his age, Mr Mountstewart was farthest from the Gerb when it finally exploded, breaking a number of windows.
I do not think my parents approved of Mr Mountstewart. In any event they never mentioned his name and my visits to his house became more or less clandestine. There I first read Slocum’s Sailing Alone Round the World and Shackleton’s South, with its description of the journey in a small open boat in the Antarctic winter from Elephant Island to South Georgia, and the subsequent crossing of that island on foot which resulted in the rescue of the rest of the members of the expedition.
I always felt that Mr Mountstewart resembled the Seafaring Rat in The Wind in the Willows who persuades the Water Rat to renounce everything and go to sea. By the time I had been at Wurzel’s a year his plans for me were nearly coming to fruition. Not only had he succeeded in making me think of nothing but sailing ships; he had also made me feel that discomfort and worse were preferable to my present situation. We would be discussing some proposed voyage and the victuals required and he would bring out the South American Pilot (Part 2), which was full of passages like this:
Off Cape St. John, the eastern point of Staten Island, a heavy tide rip extends for a distance of five or six miles or even more, to seaward. When the wind is strong and opposed to the tidal stream the overfalls are overwhelming and very dangerous even to a large and well found vessel. Seamen must use every precaution to avoid this dangerous area.
A horrid picture of the Fuegian scene was conjured up by the following extract under ‘Refuge Station – Lifeboat’:
A refuge station has been established by the Argentine Government in this harbour (St. John), provided with a lifeboat for the assistance of shipwrecked mariners. A report made in 1911 states that there was only one inhabitant of Staten Island who had been left alone at Port Cook, in charge of some machinery for extracting fat from seals, for six years.
Mr Mountstewart’s strongest card in this game of getting me to sea was the one about time running out. For me time running out meant an outbreak of war, for him it meant waking one morning to find the seas stripped of four-masted barques. There were still in 1938 thirteen vessels entirely propelled by sail, engaged in carrying grain from South Australia to Europe by way of Cape Horn. There were other cargoes for these ships; timber from Finland to East Africa, guano (a sinister kind of bird dung) fom Mauritius and the Seychelles to New Zealand, and very rarely, for the two remaining German barques, cargoes of nitrate from Tocopilla, Mejillones and other ports on the Chilean Coast to be carried round the Horn to Hamburg. But for the most part the outward voyages from Europe to South Australia round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Southern Indian Ocean were ballast passages. Grain was the staple cargo. If that failed most of these thirteen ships would soon be rusting at forgotten anchorages.
The survival of the big sailing ships in this trade was due to several favourable circumstances. Grain was not dependent on season, neither was it perishable. In the primitive ports of the Spencer Gulf, where the grain was brought down from the back blocks in sacks, steamers found it difficult to load a cargo in an economical time. Although at some ports there were mile-long jetties, at most places the grain had to be brought alongside the ships in lightering ketches and slung into the hold with the vessel’s own gear, which might, and frequently did, take weeks. But a sailing ship run with utmost economy and a low-paid crew could still in 1938 take six weeks to load her cargo of 4,000 tons of grain, reach Falmouth or Queenstown for orders after 120 days on passage and still make a profit on a round voyage of about 30,000 miles, the outward 15,000 having been made in ballast.
Moshulu, Belfast Lough, September 1938
When I returned from my holiday, events