Ships engaged in the grain trade would normally sail from Europe at the end of September or early in October in ballast, pick up the trade winds in the North and South Atlantic and, when south of Tristan da Cunha – more or less half way between South America and Africa – run before the westerlies in 40°S or higher latitudes, according to the time of year, across the southern Indian Ocean. The first landfall of the entire 15,000-nautical-mile voyage might well be the lighthouse on the South Neptune Islands at the entrance to the shark-infested Spencer Gulf in the Great Australian Bight, where the wheat was brought down to the little ports on its shores for loading. A good passage outward bound in ballast was around 80 days – we were 82 days in 1939 but Pommern was only 78.
It could be weeks or months before a freight was fixed. No pay was issued by the captain for fear that we might run away. As soon as freight was arranged, the ship would sail to the loading port; but first, miles offshore, the crew had to get rid of the ballast, shovelling it into baskets in the hold where the temperature was up in the hundreds fahrenheit, hoisting them out and emptying them over the side. It was not possible to jettison all the ballast at once, so one or more trips had to be made to the ballast grounds in the intervals of loading the cargo, which was frequently interrupted by the strong winds that blew in the Gulf. Except in one or two places where there were jetties, the ships had to lie offshore and load the sacks of grain into their holds from lightering ketches. A 3000-ton barque such as Moshulu could carry 59,000 sacks of grain, 4875 tons of it, which was what we loaded in 1939.
Even after waiting sometimes months for a freight, and then loading, which could take another six weeks, Erikson could still make a profit after a round voyage of 30,000 sea miles, 15,000 of them in ballast, even if it took some of his smaller barques 120 days or more to make the homeward voyage. The charterers were not worried; providing it was kept dry, grain was not a perishable cargo, and whoever happened to own it at any particular time on the voyage, for it often changed hands several times in the course of it, was getting free warehousing for his cargo.
The normal time of departure for Europe was between the last week in February and the end of March. A good passage home was 100 days, anything less was very good.
We sailed from Port Victoria, where we had loaded in company with the last great concourse of square-rigged merchant ships ever to come together, on 2 March 1939, bound for Queenstown (now Cobh) in Southern Ireland. Moshulu was 30 days to the Horn, well over 6000 miles’ sailing, and on 24 March, in 50°S, 170°W, she ran 296 miles in 23½ hours with the wind WSW (a day noon to noon in these high latitudes is only about 23½ hours).
She was only 55 days to the Equator from Spencer Gulf, and it seemed possible then that, having accomplished this feat of sailing, she might beat Parma’s great 83-day passage from Port Victoria to Falmouth in 1933. In fact she suffered a succession of baffling calms in the North Atlantic and was eventually 91 days to Queenstown, nevertheless making the fastest passage of the year in what was to prove to be the last great Grain Race. The slowest passage that year was 140 days by Lawhill, a very old Erikson barque.
In 1938 Moshulu was the biggest sailing ship afloat. Built in 1904 at Port Glasgow for the German nitrate trade as Kurt (she had a twin called Hans), she was also probably the strongest. She was 3116 gross tons and 335 feet long between perpendiculars. Her hull, standing rigging, and most of her masts and yards were steel. The three square-rigged masts towered 198 feet above the keel, higher than Nelson’s Column. Each of these masts crossed six yards, to which six sails were bent, a total of eighteen square sails; there were also seventeen fore-and-aft sails including five headsails. With all this canvas set, which was rare – we never set royal staysails – Moshulu carried 45,000 square feet of sail. The biggest sails, set on yards which were 95 feet long, were made from No. 1 canvas and each weighed more than a ton, much more when wet.
Moshulu could carry sail when a lesser ship would have had to heave to. In 51°S, 158°W on the way to the Horn, with the wind WSW, force 11, she was still carrying a foresail. Three hundred lines were belayed to pins on the pin rails on deck, or else were led to cleats or bitts. You had to know the name of each one in Swedish – the official language in which orders were given in the Erikson fleet – and be able to find the right one, even on a pitch-black night with seas coming aboard.
Half the foremast hands in Moshulu the year I sailed in her were first voyagers – the total complement was 32 – and although many of them were country boys with strong constitutions, all of them, including myself, found the work hard at first. An American wooden clipper of the 1850s, Donald McKay’s Sovereign of the Seas, 2421 tons, had a crew of 106. The work of handling the great acreage of sail, even with the aid of brace and halliard winches, was very heavy. Thirty-four days out from Port Victoria, two days after we passed the Falkland Islands on the way home, we started changing sails, bending a complete suit of old, patched fair-weather canvas for the tropics in order to save wear-and-tear on the strong stuff, first unbending the storm canvas and lowering it down to the deck on gantlines before stowing it away below deck. This was always done when entering and leaving the trade winds in the North and South Atlantic, four times in all on a round voyage.
While we were engaged in this work, it started to blow hard from the southeast; then it went to the south, blowing force 9 and then 10 from the south-southwest, when the mizzen lower topsail, a heavy canvas storm sail, blew out. This was followed by a flat calm and torrential rain. In the middle of the following night a pampero, a terrible wind that comes off the east coast of South America, hit the ship when it was almost in full sail, but because the Captain knew his job we only lost one sail.
In these twenty-four hours the port and starboard watches, eight boys in each, took in, re-set, took in and re-set again, twenty-eight sails – a total of 112 operations – bent two new sails and wore the ship on to a new tack twice, an operation which required all hands, including the kock (the cook), to perform it.
I was in the port watch. The starboard watch were very unlucky – everyone was unlucky some of the time; they spent eleven consecutive hours on deck, or in the rigging.
Strangely enough, I look back on the time I spent in Moshulu with the greatest pleasure, and would not swap it for the highest honours of the land.
OF ALL THE COUNTRIES I have ever been to, Italy is the one I feel and know and understand best, by which I mean that I know Italy intuitively rather than in the sense of having accumulated a mass of factual information about it. Its politics are impossible to understand and its history, apart from its artistic history, peculiarly baffling. One soon gets fed up with Guelphs and Ghibellines. I find that what really interest me most about Italy are its inhabitants.
I was twenty-two years old when I first set eyes on it through the periscope of a submarine. What I saw, against the sun in the late afternoon of an August day in 1942, was a low-lying coast shimmering in the heat, an undulating black line, like some minor tremor on the Richter scale, which might have been anywhere.
That night, when my companions and I hauled our canoes up out of the surf on this same coast, for the first time in my life – although I had travelled something like one and a half times round the world already – I found myself in Europe; that is, if you can actually call Sicily a part of Europe, or even a part of Italy. The important thing is that at that time I thought it was.
My impressions, because of how we had arrived, were somewhat different from those received by more conventional visitors. They were of a sandy shore with surf booming on to it, concrete blockhouses, barbed wire entanglements and, somewhere ahead of us, German dive bombers coming in to land.
After cutting our way through the barbed wire we met our first Italian living thing, an old white horse in a field. It was difficult to think of it as an enemy horse but