It has been left to Miles Smeeton in this book to tell us in clear and simple language just where the limits of safety lie. We now know with certainty that the seagull parallel was wrong. A small yacht, well found, well equipped, and beautifully handled, can be overwhelmed by the sea when running under bare poles dragging a warp, or when lying sideways to the sea hove to under bare poles. The Smeetons have proved it, twice. Twice these amazing people saved their waterlogged, dismasted ship by their sheer competence and sailed her safely in to port, greatly assisted on the first occasion by John Guzzwell. With equal competence they have now produced this lucid and well-written book to tell us all about it.
At the risk of offending the author I must stress the fact that these are most unusual people, lest more ordinary yachtsmen should be tempted to follow them down towards Cape Horn— ‘After all, they proved that one can get away with it, didn’t they?’ Nobody reading this account can fail to realise how excellently they had prepared, equipped, and provisioned their ship for the long voyage from Australia down in to the Roaring Forties. One can say, perhaps, that she was overmasted for that particular trip. But vessels cannot be rigged solely for going round the Horn; she had also to sail through the doldrums of the Equator on her way back to England. I visited the ship in Melbourne before she sailed; she was rugged and tough and functional to the last degree, as were the people in her.
Quite a number of yachtsmen have now sailed round the world with their wives, for the most part running downwind in the Trades in the lower, more generous latitudes. How many of the wives, I wonder, could take a sextant sight from the desperately unsteady cockpit of a small yacht at sea, work out the position line with the massed figures of the tables dancing before one’s eyes, and plot it on the chart? Beryl Smeeton can do this with such accuracy that it was common practice on this yacht for anyone who was unoccupied to take the sight and for anybody else to work out the position line; their competence was equal. What can one say of a woman who, catapulted from the cockpit of a somersaulting ship into the sea and recovered on board with a broken collarbone and a deep scalp cut, worked manually like a man with her broken bone and did not wash the blood from her hair and forehead for three weeks, judging that injuries left severely alone heal themselves best? What can one say of a woman working as a carpenter to repair the gaping holes in the doghouse while the dismasted ship lurches and slithers in enormous seas, who refuses to nail the boards in place but drills a hole for every wood screw and does the job as properly as a professional carpenter could have done it on dry land? These people are quite unusual, and all yachtsmen reading this book had better realise that fact. More ordinary people would undoubtedly have perished.
They had, I think, one gap in the great cloak of competence that wrapped them round; they thought too little of their engine. In a sailing yacht designed to cruise the oceans the auxiliary motor must always take a second place to the sails and gear, yet if the weight and complication of a motor is to be carried in a ship at all it would be better to have a good one, one that will work under extreme conditions. Tzu Hang had a petrol motor with the usual electric ignition; this motor, for the sake of the internal accommodation, as is common in week-end yachts, was buried deep down in the bilges under the doghouse deck in a position where it was practically impossible to start it by hand when immersion had killed the starter batteries. After each disaster when a motor would have been a help to the dismasted ship this motor was a useless nuisance to them; the ship would have been lighter and so safer with it overboard. They could have had a hand-starting diesel mounted up in a position where one could swing upon the handle with both hands, driving the propeller-shaft by belts or chains. Accommodation might have suffered slightly, but the motor would have worked as soon as they had drained the water from the crankcase and refilled with oil. In so functional a vessel as Tzu Hang I think the motor was unworthy of the rest of her.
The Smeetons and Tzu Hang are back in British waters now; I doubt if they will stay there. A few days ago I got a letter from Miles Smeeton. In part it reads:
We sailed on the 10th for the Firth of Forth, almost with mechanics and shipwrights still on board. Had two days to Hartlepool where we put in on account of a storm warning—and then off for the Forth and bang into a north-westerly gale. We were hove to for three days but Tzu Hang behaved beautifully and kept her decks dry and re-established our confidence.
So they go on their way again across the seas. In this admirably written book they have done a good job for yachting. All yachtsmen should read it and be grateful to the valiant people who have dared to chart the limits of their sport.
THE crowd still thronged the Spencer Street bridge when Clio and I came back from the Olympic Games. They were leaning on the parapet and looking at the Royal Yacht, as they had done ever since her arrival in Melbourne. They were in holiday mood, looking for the best angle for their cameras, and full of enthusiasm and pawky Australian humour. Just across the bridge in a shop window a notice had been posted: ‘English spik here,’ it said; and on the door of the funeral parlour, a little further up the street, there was a card saying briefly that any Olympic visitors were welcome.
Looking down river from the bridge, we could see how it wound its way between wharves, warehouses, and docks, its course marked by high cranes and the masts of ships, until in its last mile it curved between low flat banks to its outlet in Port Philip Bay. In front of us Britannia’s beautiful tall bow reached over the bridge, and beyond her, on the other side of the river, an Australian ship was moored. Immediately opposite Britannia, and tied up to the south wharf, there was another yacht, also flying the British flag, for she was registered in England, although her home was now in Canada. She was very small compared to her royal neighbour, but she also intended to sail in a few days for England, and by the same route, south of New Zealand and south of Cape Horn. She was called Tzu Hang, and she was ours.
Beyond the Britannia, and parallel to and across the river from Tzu Hang, ran Flinders Street, with its ships’ chandlers, whose shops Beryl visited every day with a preoccupied air and carrying long lists in her hand. Behind Flinders Street, the land sloped up to Collins Street, with its banks and clubs and prosperous good-looking buildings, and to the low hills on which the city of Melbourne is built. Not so long ago the river here used to be full of sailing ships, and Clio and I would have seen a forest of masts and spars; but now there were only two, Tzu Hang and a big yacht down from Sydney, which was tied up in front of us.
‘Look at that idiot cat. She isn’t half giving those sails a go,’ someone said, calling the attention of his friend to Tzu Hang, and when we looked across we saw Pwe, the Siamese cat, sharpening her claws on the cover of the mainsail. The sail-cover was put on not so much for looks as to protect the sail from the cat. As we watched we saw a man climb down on to the deck of the yacht, carrying one of the plastic bottles which we used for topping up the water tanks, and Beryl appeared in the hatch and took the bottle from him.
‘I wonder who that is?’ I said. ‘It’s not John.’
‘Oh, it’s just someone she’s roped in,’ said Clio irreverently of her mother. ‘She’s always roping someone in to work. Come on.’
She ran on now across the wharf to where Tzu Hang was lying. Although she was only fifteen she was already fully grown in height, tall and slim. She leant out from the edge of the wharf, unaware of her best clothes, and caught hold of the shrouds, and then swung on to the ratlines, and dropped down on to the deck. She wouldn’t be with us on this next trip. She had been with us on all our previous trips;