Saecwen herself was ten years old, and handsome without being flashy. She would now be regarded as a ‘classic’ yacht. With a long, deep keel, she was slow and heavy by modern standards, and a bit the worse for wear after her tough outward passage across the Atlantic. We had already had to repair some of her sails, and rust stains were starting to trickle down her white topsides. Most new yachts were already being built of glass fibre-reinforced plastic (GRP), with aluminium masts and stainless-steel rigging and deck fittings, but Saecwen was old fashioned. She was built almost entirely of traditional materials – a teak deck, with a wooden mast and hull of copper-fastened mahogany planks on oak frames. Beneath the sliding main hatch – at the forward end of the cockpit – a few steps descended into the cabin. The galley, with a small two-burner gas-fired stove and a tiny sink, was immediately on the left, while the chart table with the temperamental radio-telephone and RDF set lay on the right.3 Beyond the galley and the chart table was the saloon, a space perhaps 10 feet by 8 with a table in the middle and a settee berth on either side. It was lined with lockers – one marked with a red cross for the medical kit – and there were small bookshelves with bars to hold in their contents in heavy weather. Three oblong windows let in light at deck level on either side. Beyond the main bulkhead lay the ‘heads’ – a miniature pump-action lavatory – and the fo’c’s’l where there were two more berths and stowage for oilskins and sails. Small electric lights were dotted around the cabin but most of the time we relied on brass oil lamps.
Below deck Saecwen had a very particular smell I can still vividly recall – a musty mixture of damp timbers, diesel oil, paraffin, oilskins and dirty clothes, coupled with the scent of the ripening fruit and vegetables in the cargo nets overhead. Not very appealing perhaps, but it was far better than the sharp scent of epoxy resin that never quite vanishes from GRP boats. Being built throughout of wood Saecwen even sounded different from a plastic yacht: footsteps on deck and the thump of waves against the hull were muted and distant, and partly for that reason her white-painted saloon felt especially cosy. The eighteenth-century navigators would have felt quite at home aboard her.
The fast-spinning impellor that trailed at the end of the log-line skipped through our boiling wake as we continued reaching fast to the east under full sail. We passed through patches of yellow Gulf weed, and a sharp dorsal fin slowly zigzagging through the water, like a hound picking up a trail, revealed the presence of a large shark. A half-inflated purplish plastic bag floated by, a depressing reminder of man’s polluting habits, until on closer inspection it turned out to be a Portuguese man-of-war – a medusa, trailing its long blue fringe of stinging tendrils.
The fine weather continued and we fell into an easy routine, eating together, taking sights and otherwise either sleeping or standing watch – four hours on, four hours off at night for Colin and me, with more flexibility during the day when Alexa helped us out. Every twenty-four hours we recorded good runs of 150 miles or more, the fore hatch stood open and the steady draught of warm air gradually dried out everything down below. On deck everything was now covered with a sparkling rime of salt crystals. We hardly had to touch the sheets, and the self-steering gear4 kept us on a steady course relative to the wind. Apart from navigation and preparing food, there was little to do apart from keeping a lookout, reading and occasionally writing up the log.fn1 We kept a close eye on the western sky for any change in the weather – sometimes clouds would pile up as the sun went down, but then the night would be clear and dawn would bring in another perfect day. The barometer remained high and steady; even Colin had rarely known such beautiful sailing.
‘Food’, I wrote in my journal, ‘becomes a major interest and it matters far more than usual that it should be good. In fact good fresh food on a plate and plenty to drink are the main things one misses. Also keeping reasonably clean.’ We still had some apples, potatoes, eggs and onions, but otherwise most of our fresh food had run out. We carried 35 gallons of fresh water and used this only for drinking; our rice or potatoes were boiled in seawater. We all now looked disgusting, with filthy, lank hair and – in Colin’s case and mine – increasingly stubbly cheeks.
People sometimes complain of the monotony of the sea, but it is, with the sky, the most changeful of all natural spectacles. Its surface, brushed by the wind, whether gently or with violence, presents patterns of infinite variety, and its colour too undergoes astonishing transformations, depending on factors like the time of day, the depth of water and the weather. But despite the ever-changing vistas of sea and sky, time passed very slowly and I often found the close physical confinement trying. We spent almost all our time either on watch in the narrow cockpit, a space perhaps 7 foot by 5 with the tiller in the middle, or down below in the saloon. This was a bit bigger, but there was very little room to move around, and at more than 6 foot I could not stand upright. In fine weather I would often sneak off to the foredeck to read. There was nowhere else to go but overboard. We were getting very little physical exercise and this probably contributed to my sense of frustration and impatience: sometimes I felt like screaming.
Colin deliberately did not plot our position on the small-scale North Atlantic chart until we were well on our way, and even then it looked as if we had hardly made any progress. This was not surprising given that we were crossing 3,000 miles of ocean at a rate seldom faster than a brisk jog. The possibility that the weather might change for the worse was always on our minds, as we knew we would be lucky not to encounter a gale at some point. The condition of the boat was also a concern – we ran the engine for an hour or so every few days to charge the batteries, pumped out the bilges (counting how many strokes it took to assess how leaky the boat was) and watched the sails and rigging for signs of wear and tear. Sometimes we had to carry out minor repairs. The sliders that attached the mainsail to the track running up the mast often came loose and had to be reattached, and we sewed up a seam on one of the foresails where the stitching had worn out. The steering compass too caused problems: the fluid in which the compass card floated began to leak out and a bubble appeared in the clear plastic bowl that covered it. As the bubble steadily grew it became harder to read the course, so we dismantled the binnacle, found the leak and patched it up with chewing gum. We then topped up the fluid with gin, but the operation was not a complete success – a small parcel of air obstinately wobbled at the top of the bowl, and the cost in precious liquor was high.
One day a bird landed on Saecwen’s deck – some kind of flycatcher, I think – so exhausted that it made no attempt to move when I offered it some water. Eventually it fluttered away. How it had reached us and where it was going was a mystery. As our distance from the land steadily increased, some part of me was always anxiously aware of the immensity of the ocean, the miles of water fading into chilly darkness beneath us, and the almost ludicrous smallness and fragility of our 35-foot boat.
*
Despite our compass problems, our sextant and chronometer told us where we were to within a few miles. The exotically named Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell was less fortunate when, on the night of 22 October 1707, he entered the English Channel with twenty-one British warships under his command. The fleet drove on to the reef-strewn Isles of Scilly, which were then guarded only by a single lighthouse on the island of St Agnes, and four ships went down with the loss of some 2,000 lives. Shovell himself was washed ashore and reportedly murdered by a local woman who fancied a ring on his finger. This notorious disaster, which has often been cited as evidence of the dangers of navigating without an accurate means of determining longitude, may in fact have been caused by errors in the assessment of the fleet’s latitude, or by mistakes in the recorded position of the Scilly Isles5 – quite possibly both.
Navigation posed many problems in the days before celestial navigation was perfected and the cause of a wreck can therefore seldom be attributed to any single factor. The notorious loss of the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia in 1629 is a case in point.6 She was wrecked on a reef off the west coast of Australia after crossing the Indian Ocean on her way to Java. The reef in question was part of an extensive group of low islands discovered by a Dutch sailor called Frederik de Houtman in 1619, and the Batavia drove on to it under full sail. The lookout had in fact spotted white water ahead but the master, convinced that it was merely a reflection of the light of the moon, refused to alter course or shorten sail. A faulty