The Last Grain Race

She had a very handsome, fine bow entrance somehow disproportionate to her rather heavy overall appearance; a tiny poop only twenty feet long also contrived to spoil her looks when seen from the beam, but the general effect was undeniably impressive. Like Archibald Russell, Moshulu was fitted with bilge keels to make her more stable. Above the loadline the hull was painted black except for the upper works of the amidships, which were white. Her masts and spars were light yellow. Under the bowsprit there was no splendid figurehead like those of the Killoran and Pommern, only on the beak beneath the bowsprit a carved boss with a coat-of-arms picked out in yellow and blue, the house mark of Siemers, the Hamburg owners who had had her originally in the nitrate trade.

The masts, fore, main, mizzen and jigger, were each supported by a system of heavy fore-and-aft stays, six on the foremast, four on the main and mizzen, three on the jigger. On the foremast the forestay that supported it was a double stay set up taut with rigging screws shackled into the deck on the fo’c’sle head. The fore topmast stay, the next above the forestay, was also a double stay led through blocks on either side of the bowsprit and passed round rigging screws. The bowsprit itself was held rigid by two stays underneath it, the outer and inner bobstays, and on each side by three bowsprit guys shackled into the bows.

The three square-rigged masts were supported by shrouds of heavy wire; three pairs of lower shrouds extending from the bulwarks to the ‘top,’ round the mast and back to the bulwarks; three topmast shrouds extending from the ‘top’ to the crosstrees; and two topgallant shrouds above. From aft came great stresses and there were nine backstays on each mast to meet them. Both lower shrouds and backstays were set up to the hull plating and tautened by heavy rigging screws. All the doublings were wormed, parcelled, served and painted black; the seizings were white, one of the few concessions to the picturesque in the whole ship.

In the days when a ship’s masts and yards were wooden, the rigging was of hemp, set up with lanyards and deadeyes. In a dismasting it was sometimes possible to cut away the wreckage and allow it to go by the board; but the shrouds and backstays of Moshulu’s standing rigging were of steel wire so thick and strong that if the masts went over the side and one set of rigging screws was torn bodily out of the ship, it would be a tremendous job to cut away the slack rigging on the lee side without special equipment if the rigging screws stripped their threads.

Each square-rigged mast crossed six yards to which six sails were bent, a total of eighteen: the royal, upper and lower topgallants, upper and lower topsails and below these the big course-sails, fore, main and mizzen. There was a total of thirteen fore-and-aft sails: four head sails set on the forestays to the bowsprit – the flying jib outermost, set on the fore topgallant stay, the outer and inner jibs and the fore topmast staysail all set on their respective stays. In addition there were two staysails set on the topmast and topgallant forestays between each mast, six in all. There could have been royal staysails too, but they were never set in Moshulu while I was in her. With a small crew topgallant staysails were more than enough. Once we set a fore royal staysail beyond the flying jib, but it blew out in a squall and the experiment was not repeated. All the fore-and-aft sails had downhauls for taking them in and halliards for setting them. On the jigger mast there were three fore-and-aft sails, a triangular gaff topsail, an upper spanker between the upper gaff and the gaff boom and biggest of all, the lower spanker. The two lower sails were controlled by brails and were difficult to furl. The arrangement of three sails on the after mast was peculiar to the ex-German nitrate traders. Most barques only had two. With all these sails set, Moshulu’s sail area was in the region of 45,000 square feet.

Vytautas took me right out on the bowsprit. Into the tip of it several nails had been driven, to which some dried horny fragments adhered.

‘Shark’s fins,’ said Vytautas. ‘Good luck, not much of it left now.’ We were facing one another on the footrope. ‘Very dangerous here,’ he said happily. ‘No netting under the bowsprit. If she runs heavily she may dip and wash you off. If you are sent to furl the “Jagare”, that’s the flying jib, look out for the sheet block, it can easily knock you into the water. Remember, please,’ he added a little more wistfully, ‘if you fall from here the ship will go over you and by the time she can heave-to it will be too late to find you.’

I was suitably impressed by these observations and had reason to remember them on many occasions during the voyage.

We worked our way down the bowsprit to the white-railed fo’c’sle head deck, the raised part of the ship at the bows. To port and starboard were Moshulu’s bower anchors, of the old-fashioned kind with stocks, lashed down to the deck. Their stocks prevented them being hauled close up to the hawse pipes, and there was a small crane to lift them on board. Beneath the crane was a teak pin rail with iron pins in it to which the downhauls of the headsails were belayed. The sheets led to pin rails on either side of the fo’c’sle head just above the well deck. In addition there was a capstan with square holes in it to take the heads of the wooden capstan bars. At sea this capstan was used for hauling down the tack of the foresail when the vessel was beating into the wind, but it could also be geared to the anchor windlass beneath the fo’c’sle head. On both sides of the capstan there were massive bitts to which the tack of the foresail could be made fast.

At the break of the raised deck were the two lighthouses which protected the port and starboard navigation lights; each could be entered through a hole in the roof of the lamp rooms under the fo’c’sle head. In port, the copper domes of these lighthouses were neglected and bright green from exposure, but at sea, unless the weather was very bad, they were kept brightly burnished. Two companion ladders led to the well-deck below, and between them hung in a sort of gallows the big bronze bell with Kurt, Hamburg (the name given her by her German owners), engraved on it.

Lashed up next to the bell, with its heel on the deck, was the spare sheet-anchor. Immediately below the lighthouses on the well-deck were the pigsties, built solidly of steel but for the present untenanted.

Underneath the fo’c’sle head-deck were the lavatories, ablution rooms, blacksmith’s stores, the boatswain’s store, and the port and starboard lamp-rooms. It was a draughty, smelly part of the ship. The lavatories were very gruesome, with no locks on the doors and no flushing arrangements. I had spent a memorable half-hour on the first morning cleaning them with a long iron rod and innumerable buckets of dirty dock-water. This was the most disgusting task I have ever been called upon to perform in peace or war. In war not even the pits beside the railway tracks so thoughtfully provided by the Germans for our convenience when we were being moved westwards in chains from Czechoslovakia equalled the lavatories in Moshulu.

Between the two washrooms stood the anchor windlass with its massive cables, and the salt-water pump, a very rickety affair with a pipeline aft to the main deck.

Immediately aft of the pump was No 1 hatch, a tiny thing eight feet square, leading down into the tween deck space and also to the forepeak where the bulk of the coal for the galley was kept. Forward of the coal store were the chain lockers, two vertical shafts in which the anchor cables were faked down link by link as they came in over the windlass pawls above. In the forepeak were great coils of wire strop, mooring springs and towing hawser, and for some distance aft in the ’tween-deck the space was filled with a pell-mell of bundled sail. The ’tween-deck was really an upper hold eight feet high, extending the length and breadth of the ship as far as the after peak, or lazarette, beneath the poop. This deck was pierced through by tonnage openings of the same size as the hatches above them. At sea both the hatches above and the tonnage openings below were battened down, cutting off the upper and lower holds. There was no artificial light below and because of this there was to be a nasty accident quite soon.

Next to No 1 hatch the great trunk of the foremast rose up through the deck from its roots on the keelson of the ship. By the mast was a teak fife rail with iron belaying pins to which the headsail halliards and the sheets of four square sails above the lower topsail were belayed; the lower topsail and foresail sheets were belayed to cleats on the fore part of the mast itself. Not far distant from the fore mast were the halliard winches for raising the upper topsail yards and topgallant yards when setting sail. The royal halliards rove through blocks and were belayed to the pin rails. It took ten men to raise a royal yard. The square sail halliards were so placed that with the yards raised they became in effect additional backstays.

Abaft the foremast was the donkey boiler room with a hinged funnel on top where Jansson and his even more savage-looking superior tended their charge, which was intended to raise the anchors. On very rare occasions it provided power for sending aloft the heavier sails. Here the Donkeymen kept the tools of their trade, which included a blacksmith’s forge, spares for the winches and, an important item, a blow-lamp with which they were always brewing cocoa, happily independent of the irascible cook. On either side of the donkey house was a capstan to which the sheets of the great foresail were brought through fairleads in the bulwarks. They were also used to send sail aloft by manpower.

Between the donkey house and the raised bridge deck amidships was No 2 hatch with Jansson’s dismantled winch beside it. Here the Belfast stevedores, using shore cranes, were unloading with an almost ritualistic deliberation, like figures in a slow-motion film of a coronation ceremony. To port and starboard were the pin rails for the forebraces which controlled the final angle or trim of the foresail and upper and lower topsail yards after they had been roughly braced round with a Jarvis brace winch. Only the course and topsail yards on each mast were operated by winches. The hand braces for the topgallant and royal yards came down to the deck still farther aft on the midships section, and were belayed to the fife rail at the mainmast.

Next to the mainmast was the Jarvis brace winch for the foremast yards with which four men could brace round the course and upper and lower topsail yards according to the direction of the wind, the wire braces playing out on cone-shaped drums on one side of the winch, whilst the slack was taken up by a similar set on the other side. There were three Jarvis brace winches in Moshulu, which eased what would otherwise have been an almost impossible task in so large a vessel for a crew as small as ours. The remaining yards, the two topgallants and the royals, were braced round with long rope braces. In the same way those operated by the winch had also to be trimmed properly by hand.

The forepart of the raised bridge-deck was painted white and had brass scuttles set in it. These portholes shed some light into the port and starboard fo’c’sles and into the galley where the Cook, that most wretched of men, lived in a stifling atmosphere filled with escaping steam, looking very much like ‘the Spirit of the Industrial Revolution’ in a Nursery History of England. The bridge deck, sixty-five feet long, forty-seven feet on the beam, was connected with the fo’c’sle head and poop decks by flying bridges over the fore and main decks which enabled the Mates to move about more quickly when issuing orders. On the bridge-deck was the charthouse, a massive construction where the charts, sailing directions, log-book, barometer and navigational instruments were housed. A companion-way led below to the Officers’ quarters.

Right amidships were the two massive teak wheels connected with the steering-gear aft by well-greased wire cables running through sheaves in the deck. These cables would sometimes break when a heavy sea was running. In a big gale three men would stand on the raised platforms to assist the helmsman who checked the more violent movements of the wheel with a foot-brake set in the floor. In front of the wheel was the big brass binnacle and behind the helmsman was the ship’s bell on which he echoed the striking of the clock inside the charthouse. On a brass plaque below the bell was engraved: Wm. Hamilton, Shipbuilders, Port Glasgow.

Beneath the bridge-deck, in the forepart, were the port and starboard fo’c’sles with the galley in between them; the Petty Officers’ cabin, which housed Carpenter, Donkeymen, and the Sailmaker’s assistant, who normally worked by day; and the Sailmaker’s loft. In the after part were the six rooms of the Master’s accommodation – saloon, bathroom, cabin, etc – spare room for guests – and the Officers’ quarters, also the accommodation for the Steward and Cook. The Steward, Steward’s boy and Cook lived aft but helped to work the ship, and even went aloft when the necessity arose.

Short ladders to port and starboard led down to the 130-foot long main deck, where the ports of the Captain’s saloon amidships faced on to No 3 hatch. By the mizzen mast was another Jarvis winch for the mainbraces, the mizzen halliard winches and the main pumps. On either side of it were skids supporting the ship’s motor-boat and a gig. Farther aft, to port and starboard, were two sets of davits each supporting a lifeboat. Between them was the standard compass on a raised platform, level with the flying bridge and connected with it, a henhouse on skids above the deck, No 4 hatch, a freshwater tank, just before the break of the short poop and the jigger mast with the mizzen brace winch. On the poop was the patent sounding machine, a capstan and the spare kedge-anchor.

Beneath the poop was the entrance to the after peak where the stores were kept. It was covered with a grating, heavily padlocked. Also under the poop was a pair of auxiliary wheels which could be connected to the steering-gear if the cables parted; there was also a binnacle with a compass card that displayed the most extraordinary abberrations. The helmsman’s head projected right through the deck, but he was so walled-in by a curved steel coaming above and on either side that only a very imperfect view aloft could be had through the glass window in the front of it. There were six compartments under the poop. Two were originally intended for the apprentices, one was appropriated by the Sailmaker as a cabin in cold weather, another served the Carpenter as a workshop.

The bulwarks on the fore-well and main decks were shoulderhigh and fitted with steel doors at intervals, hinging outwards from the top. These freeing ports enabled the water to drain off when the ship took a heavy sea. They made an abominable din and ropes were often washed off belaying pins and jammed in them.

All the slack of running rigging was coiled down on these belaying pins. There were a couple of hundred pins with some 300 lines belayed to them, some miles of hemp, wire and chain. As no sails were bent aloft, they seemed mystifying and without purpose.

All this I learned from Vytautas.

‘The higher the gear, the farther aft, is the rule,’ he said. ‘You see, it’s quite easy.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You know the names of all the yards?’ asked Vytautas.

‘Yes,’ I said. I thought I did.

‘But do you know buntlines from leechlines and clewlines and the difference between a sheet and a tack? You will have to know these things, you will have to know them in Swedish, and you will have to find them at night.’

‘How?’

‘We must see Sömmarström. He’s the Sailmaker and the only one who can help you.’

*

That night I went ashore with Jansson and Vytautas Bagdanavicius to have a ‘liddle trink’. It was the farewell to the boys who were going back to Mariehamn. A steady Ulster drizzle was falling as we came on to the dockside and the cobblestones shone greasily in the glare of the arc lights.

It was a long way to the main gate. We passed a steamer moored astern of us, brilliantly lit, throbbing with the movement of hidden machinery; there was no one about her, no one on the dockside, only a mangy cat scrabbling at a rubbish pile, whilst the rain swished down into the filthy water of the dock. After what seemed an interminable walk, for my feet still ached after the business in the rigging, we arrived at the dock gates, where in addition to the watchman there were two vast Belfast policemen, hard as nails, armed with pistols and long sticks, who eyed us unlovingly. Outside the gate we were on the Donegal Quay where, what now seemed a whole life ago, I had put my trunk in a taxi. Facing us, across the quay, was a wild and woolly-looking pub with its name ‘Rotterdam Bar’ over the door in letters of blood.

Inside, most of the crew had already gathered. Many of them I had never seen. Those I had were unrecognizable in the shore-going uniform, single-breasted blue serge suits of very Teutonic cut and light-coloured caps. In their company the evening passed in a haze. I remember meeting an Englishman called Sowerby who had just completed a round voyage in Moshulu as a passenger. As the evening wore on and people became drunker and spoke more freely I got the impression that the ship had not been very happy or the Captain very popular.

I was unused to beer in large quantities and, downing pint after pint, I quite soon found myself drunk. Leaning my forehead on the brickwork in the lavatory, I remember being sick and groaning to myself: ‘Oh, God, I’m drunk, oh, Christ, I’m drunk, what am I here for?’

There was a lot of singing of a dark, Nordic kind. Then, after a long while, I heard a voice calling ‘Time’. Lights were dimmed and we reeled out into the wet unfriendly night.

Someone suggested that we should dance and we set off down a street of heart-breaking squalor in the direction of a dance hall on the first floor of a building in Corporation Street. We went up a flight of narrow stairs and paid a shilling each to a man who, in any Police Court, would have been described by the Magistrate as a ‘Corrupter of Youth’. The pleasures which we were made free of appeared innocuous enough. The room was large and to the music of a modernist radiogram two or three couples were circling rather gingerly. At intervals the music was drowned by the noise of passing tramcars which swayed past the uncurtained windows like ‘Flying Dutchmen’. The seats round the walls were filled with a lot of girls heavily powdered but well below the age of consent. Some were drinking fizzy lemonade. Most of them looked like schoolgirls who ought to have been in bed asleep by this time after finishing their homework. Soon I was prancing round the room with a big, niffy red-headed girl who was liberally covered with the wrong shade of powder. I tried to talk to her but was relieved to find that she spoke no known tongue. I was very tired.

I was almost glad when a quarrel broke out between one of our crew and one of the natives; chairs were raised and began to fly through the air, the lights went out, there was the crash of glass and a bottle landed in Corporation Street. My partner vanished to join the opposition and soon we were fighting a rear-guard action on the stairs. By the time we reached the street police whistles were trilling merrily.

The march back to the ship was like the ‘Retreat from Moscow’ painted by an elderly spinster. The injured and the incapable were being supported by their companions. Jansson, who was very far gone, was being held up by Vytautas and myself, one on either side.

‘The police will not like this,’ said Vytautas, who was almost sober. ‘I also do not like this place.’

At his suggestion we disengaged ourselves from the main body and made for a different entrance to the dock. Just then Jansson passed out completely and we dragged him forward along the street with his feet scuffling the granite cobbles.

‘We must lift him now,’ said Vytautas, as we came up to the gate. There were the inevitable two policemen, suspicious and broken-nosed. They bore down on us as we hoisted the Wretched Jansson into a vertical, more lifelike position.

‘Where are you going?’ one of them demanded accusingly.

‘Moshulu,’ said Vytautas in a disarming way.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked the other, flourishing his great bludgeon in the direction of Jansson whose head unfortunately chose this moment to fall forward with an audible click.

‘He is suffering from overwork,’ I said with drunken insolence, and hiccuped. Nothing seemed to matter any more. Fortunately the policeman failed to understand my English accent. At the same time the drizzle of rain increased to a downpour and they both retired to their hut. Otherwise we should probably have been arrested.

We proceeded on our miserable and interminable way. To reach the Moshulu we had to pass round three sides of the York Dock. On the way we tripped over a hawser in a patch of shadow and nearly dropped Jansson in the water.

At the gangplank we were met by a bedraggled watchman armed with a pick helve who scrutinised us minutely before allowing us on board. Exhausted and wet we reeled into the fo’c’sle and after removing Jansson’s boots, pushed him into his bunk and sought our own. As soon as I lay down on my straw mattress the fo’c’sle began to revolve like a gramophone record. I crawled on deck, barking my shins on all sorts of projections, and sticking my head over the rail, was fearfully sick for the second time. It had been a long, long day.

5

Over the Side

We were awakened at 5.30 in the morning after our ‘liddle trink’ by a dreadful voice crying, ‘Resa upp, Resa upp.’ This summons with its medieval implications of Hell and Judgment, made me feel like a corpse in a Dürer engraving, and the illusion was sustained when I sat up in the coffin-like bunk and hit my head a great crack on the bedboards of the bunk above.

‘Shot op,’ came an angry voice from the occupant of the upper bunk. I lay still in the stifling blackness until the fo’c’sle door was kicked open and the night-watchman, in oilskins, appeared with a lantern, which he hooked to the ceiling, and a pot of coffee which he banged down on the table. One by one groaning figures began to roll out of their coffins and grovel for boots. From outside came the hiss of rain in the darkness of the too-early morning.

This was to be such an invariable routine, the watchman impatient and bad-tempered after a night on deck, surrounded by the terrors of Belfast that I no longer remember individual days but only that awful first morning.

With two others I was given the job of carrying coal to the galley from the small hatch near the fo’c’sle head. In the coal store by the forepeak we filled great oil-drums with coal, manhandled them in the darkness below decks to the hatch opening, hauled them on deck and carried them to the galley, slung on a capstan bar – hard work for my unpractised arms. We made ten journeys like this before the Cook was satisfied. Afterwards I again cleaned the lavatories.

At eight o’clock came breakfast, which was a mess of pungent beans and very pickled bacon. I was then told to collect a hammer, a pot of red lead and a brush and go over the side forward to chip the rust off the topsides – a job the more experienced and favoured members of the crew had been engaged in since 6 a.m. Rain was still falling steadily. There were already two or three precarious platforms over the side when I got there. They were simply planks with ropes made fast to either end and belayed on deck.

Painting the ship

I do not think it was by design that the platform I inherited was in the most difficult position right over the bows, about two feet above the water. Grimly I lowered myself twenty feet to the platform, to find that it was immediately below the lavatory which I had just cleaned. I began to wish that I had used two or three more buckets of water, and this was a good lesson to me in doing a job thoroughly. At sea one was very likely to find oneself let down by one’s own mistakes. I had not the strength to climb the rope again and shift to a more wholesome area, so I settled down to work where I was.