‘How delightful and cosy I felt turning into my sleeping-bag in the first watch, better far than a dozen blankets. Off the Horn the air is so moist that once one’s blankets are damp they never get dry again; besides which the iron side of the half-deck sweats awfully, and drops on to everything. But when everybody and everything else was wet off the Horn I would crawl into my bag, my underclothes wet, my socks dripping, I did not take them off as the only chance to get them dry was by the heat of my body, and in turning out again I would find my clothes dry, and my feet smoking hot, notwithstanding the wet socks.’
The demand for caribou bags had slumped since the Gold Rush of 98. I learned this after visiting the showrooms of half a dozen manufacturers of camping equipment. In most of them I was met with blank stares of incomprehension. True to type, the assistants in those of the better sort, being asked for something outside their experience, refused to admit the existence of such a bag. In the most elegant of Piccadilly outfitters I was told by a man in a tail coat who looked like an aloof penguin that he had not been made aware of the caribou, and I returned home feeling like a character in an undiscovered sequel to Alice Through the Looking-glass.
Mr Mountstewart suggested the Army and Navy Stores. I was naturally a little wary of him by this time, but he produced that most remarkable work, the Stores Catalogue, which was as thick as a telephone directory, and this, although it did not list caribou skin bags, hinted that even more extraordinary articles could be obtained to order. I therefore decided to pay a visit to Victoria Street.
The man in the department which dealt with camping equipment received my request very well. He had heard of the caribou and could see no reason why its skin should not be turned into a sleeping-bag.
‘I suppose we could get one,’ he remarked rather gloomily. ‘It’ll have to come from one of the Hudson’s Bay posts. We’ll have to barter for it but I’ll take your name and address and let you know.’
‘When will it be here?’ I asked anxiously; time was getting short.
‘It should be here in two years. They’re nasty things. The last one gave the man who slept in it anthrax.’
I thanked him and after looking up ‘Anthrax’ in an encyclopaedia in the book department, I gave up the struggle. I was content. I knew now that if I really wanted a caribou skin bag I could have one. Instead I bought from him a real camel-hair sleeping-bag of four thicknesses made by Jaeger. In 1956 the hair of the camel is as rare as the skin of the caribou and much more expensive. I used it until 1942, when an athletic Egyptian leapt into the back of the truck in which we were driving down from the Desert, and removed three large bedding rolls belonging to myself and two brother officers; mine contained, in addition to all my other possessions, the sleeping-bag.
When I returned home, I found a letter from the owner’s agents telling me to join the sailing vessel Moshulu in Belfast. She was the one ship I had never heard of, and none of the more popular works on sailing ships gave any information about her. Even Mr Mountstewart knew nothing. However, just before I left for Euston he telephoned me. ‘I understand,’ he boomed, ‘that she is extremely large.’
I crossed on the night steamer from Heysham and as we came into Belfast in the cold early morning I saw for the first time the masts and spars of Moshulu. By comparison the scaffolding of the shipyards, where riveting hammers reverberated about the dark bulk of a new Union Castle liner, seemed solid and rooted in the earth. The barque was invisible, but the four enormously tall masts, fore, main and mizzen, and the less lofty jigger mast, towered into the sky above the sheds of the dockside, not white as I had imagined them, but yellow in the October sunshine.
‘Anyone’s welcome to that,’ said the smooth young steward as he plonked a pot of Oxford marmalade on my table. ‘Nasty great thing.’
I did not have the strength to argue with him. All through breakfast I had felt like someone in a condemned cell and my knees had been knocking together under the influence of a nervous impulse which I had been unable to control.
On the quay when I landed there had been some competition among the waiting taximen for my Vuitton trunk. ‘You’ll be wanting the Grand Central Hotel, most likely?’ said the shaggy owner of the most dilapidated taxi who had finally secured me as a fare. I told him I wanted to go to the Moshulu and as this did not seem to mean anything to him, I pointed to the towering masts, upon which he mumbled something about ‘that big sailer full of Chinks’ and we set off at a crazy speed, lurching into the puddles where the cobbles had subsided and slewing dangerously across the tracks of tank engines that bore down upon us at full steam. I barely noticed these things as I was in terror at the thought of climbing those masts which had a beautiful cold remoteness about them like the North Col on Everest. For the first time in my life I wished that a taxi ride would never end, but it was only three or four hundred yards to where the ship was discharging her cargo in York Dock and, too soon for me, we drew up alongside her. There was no sign of life aboard except on the well deck forward, where some stevedores were still unloading her cargo of grain.
Moshulu taken in Cork (Cobh), June 1936
I left the taximan extracting my trunk from the fore part of his vehicle where it had become jammed between the floor and the roof, and went forward to explore, waiting for a lull in the unloading operations to go up a slippery plank which led over the bulwarks and so on to the deck. When I reached it I began to feel that the taximan might be right about the ship being full of Chinese, for I found myself face to face with a rather squat, flatnosed boy of about seventeen who would have looked more at home outside a nomad tent in Central Asia. From beneath a great shock of disordered hair his eyes stared unwaveringly at me. Only the filthy dungarees in which he was dressed and the oilcan he carried proclaimed him to be a child of the West.
It was his face that finally reassured me. Surely, I thought to myself, such an ugly face has something better behind it. I held out my hand and said: ‘I am Newby, a new apprentice.’
The slant eyes looked at me suspiciously but I thought I could detect a glimmer of interest in them. He did not take my hand but a deep voice finally said, in a way that made me jump, ‘Doonkey.’ Believing this to be an epithet directed at me, I began to prepare myself for a fight. None of the books I had read said anything about a situation like this. Their heroes fought only after months of insult. Fortunately I was mistaken and he put me at ease by pointing at himself and saying: ‘Jansson, “Doonkey,” orlright,’ and at the same time grasping my hand which completely disappeared in his.
This was one of the two Donkeymen responsible for the proper functioning of the donkey engine, the diesel, brace and halliard winches and all things mechanical on board. In spite of his villainous appearance he was really the most tolerant and long-suffering of people, and we went through the entire voyage without trouble.
I indicated the trunk on the dock, and Jansson said: ‘Orlright’ again, and we went down the gangplank to the taxi. The driver was waving a piece of the roof of his vehicle which had broken off in his efforts to dislodge the trunk and was telling a little knot of stevedores everything he knew about me. As our acquaintance had been short he was drawing effortlessly on his own ample imagination. I was anxious to be rid of him and overpaid him considerably, but this encouraged him to ask for a large sum for the damage to his taxi, for which he said I was responsible.