Derek Lundy

"Keep your arse tight," was the advice from shipmates as they struggled to furl a sail in 60 knot winds, more than 100 feet off the deck, being lashed by rain and snow, knuckles bleeding, hands cracked, the sail flapping yet stiff as a board, feet clamped to the foot-rope as they lean over the edge of the yard, their feet often swinging above their heads while the ship careens at a 45 degree angle, masts swinging wildly in huge arcs from side to side.

The Beara Head, a collier was much larger than Lundy's grandfather was used to; he usually plied the coastal trade rather than this trip around the Horn bound for Valpariso. The scale was intimidating. The mainmast yard weighted 4 tons and stretched 20 feet beyond the edge of the deck on either side for a total of 84 feet. "But he was discovering that height, the square-rigger sailor's dimension was a unique category of distance with its own rules of perception, its special calculus of fear. He remembered a deep-water sailor telling him that the height of the yards and masts on a square-rigger meant nothing. Past thirty feet or so the fall would kill you as surely as from 150 feet. The only difference was the amount of time you had to think about things on the way down."

The ship first had to be loaded with coal. As steam ships increased in number, they required coal and the cheapest way to ship coal was by sail. As more coal was transported the number of steamships increased in a vicious circle that eventually doomed the sailing ship. In the meantime, though, soft coal was dumped into the hold by cranes which was then shoveled by hand throughout to balance the ship correctly. Coal dust was everywhere and a good sign. Lack of dust meant wet coal, which was more likely to overheat and self-ignite, something to be avoided. So the sailors just breathed in as little as possible and tried not to think of the consequences. An OSHA inspector would probably have had a heart attack, or perhaps a citation-writing wet-dream.

Food was terrible (the weevils probably the most nutritious part), the living conditions deplorable, the officers despotic, often more than cruel, and the dangers extreme. Yet men kept signing up and often missed the grandeur of the sea and the known quantity of the life. Conrad was a seaman for twenty years and even after three years of marriage and a baby thought about returning to the orderly yet adventurous life: "that un-tempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose."

Lundy has a wonderfully clear way of explaining the obscure, at least to this landlubber. On pg 51 he describes the sails' pattern that looks overly complicated but "this impression is really result of repetition rather than genuine complexity. [yeah, right:] There are only two species of sails -- square sails and fore-and-aft-sails--and each kind, together with its controlling lines, is a simple mechanism by itself. The apparent complexity arises only because each sail is repeated many times over."

I finally now understand the difference between "wearing" and "tacking." "Seamen letting go main and crojack lines and hauling the sails up by their clew lines so they'll swing free; the barque coming up closer to the wind, sails flogging and rattling, lines flailing, masts vibrating--the seamen can feel it in their feet through the deck. The turn slowing now as sails lose the wind's force, waves slapping and pounding on the weather side, resisting the vessel's pivot. Now the ship is almost head to the wind, its momentum lost; the captain standing square, facing forward, straining to see, his head swaying from side to side to catch the precise direction of the wind in relation to his ship's bow.

"He can't see but senses the bowsprit wihtin a point or so of head to wind. He yells the crucial order: 'Mainsail haul!'

"At once, the seamen haul hard and fast on the main and mizzen braces. . . .Yards swing round at the run, just enough momentum to bring the bow through, foremast sails untouched, now aback, wind blowing into their forward side, helping the ship's turn; men getting the yards round and trimmed as close as possible on the new tack before the wind fills the sails--to avoid hauling the wind as well--sheeting the fore-and-aft sails onto the new tack, haujling round topgallant and royal braces as the main and mizzen sails begin to draw. The ship pushes ahead, waves helping now as they butt the bow to leeward, men belaying lines. . . ."

This feat had to be done hundreds of times as the ship traveled into the wind. They were forced to travel over a thousand miles to go 240 miles south. The gales that prevented ships from exiting the British Isles had consequences. For the Spanish Armada it was disaster, for 1170 vessels in one year alone! it meant destruction, including thirty in one day. On the other hand it was good training ground for the amateurs that were pressed into service before they got into the Atlantic.

The common seaman, a man with extraordinary skills and endurance, was nevertheless mere chattel, "contemptible but necessary," much like the common soldier. "(It was an ancient perspective, and it would persist through Balaclava, Gettysburg, the Somme and Verdun, Dieppe, and the Yalu.) Without these lower forms of life, it would be impossible to do the great and necessary work of society and the empire. The same cold be said for the workers in the new industrial factories and mills, and for coal miners. It was no different for seamen." In fact, being killed in battle, the ostensible reason men were pressed on to warships, was statistically insignificant. During the Seven Years War there were 134,000 men killed while at sea. Of those, only 1,512 were killed in battle, the rest by disease or accident. Between 1792 and 1815 only 6% of the naval deaths were in battle.

Conventional wisdom has it that the opening of the Suez Canal for steamships meant the demise of sailing ships. This was not quite true and, in fact, sailing ships made a real comeback in the late 19th century because they were the cheapest and most efficient way to transport bulk cargo. Until power plants could develop at least 60 lbs per square inch of pressure, steamships could barely carry enough coal to get them where they were going let alone provide space for cargo. Larger sailing ships, like the Beara Head used the wind to get them where they were going, provided free storage for a cargo that often changed hands many times during the voyage, and delivered coal for free. Human lives, as was also apparent in the First World War, were expendable. Britain, having a large amount of coal, became the Persian Gulf of the late 19th century.

Making the voyages even more efficient was the work of Matthew Fontaine Maury who had been invalided out of the US Navy in the 1830's and made his life's work a study of wind and sea currents by collecting data from ship captains. He discovered that the traditional routes were the least efficient and soon ships were making the voyage from England to Australia in as little as 65 days by sailing as much as 10 degrees of latitude south of the Cape and through the "roaring forties." Tougher on the seaman--waves might freeze on the bowsprit--but a lot faster, often making 10 - 14 knots, the equivalent of steamers.

By 1891, with the development of the triple expansion engine, steel hulls, and consistency through calm winds, the end of the sailing ship was clear. The Aberdeen made a passage from England to Australia in 42 days using "half an ounce of coal for each mile per ton of cargo, about one tenth the requirements of the old compound engines. l

By the way: You can book a voyage on a barque called the Europa:

http://www.barkeuropa.com/en/fotoboek/album/62/

Little pieces of trivia that I delight in: Lots of quaint little traditions. Each sailor was required to present his knife early in the voyage to the carpenter who knocked off the point "leaving a sharp edge but a blunt tip." The purpose was "So we can't stick 'em each other, m'boy," Ben was told. Several kept additional sharply pointed knives in their kits, anyway. And steel ships cause huge problems for the ship's compass. In fact, insurers would refuse to cover iron vessels on deep-sea voyages.Finally, they discovered that placing little sift iron balls on either side of the compass would neutralize the magnetic fields causing the compass deviations.

Just a couple of peeves: the book needs an index for trivia junkies like myself. Lots of information in the book, but hard to access. And why would they give this book the a title so similar to the one by Alan Villiers: THE WAY OF A SHIP; BEING SOME ACCOUNT OF THE ULTIMATE DEVELOPMENT OF THE OCEAN-GOING SQUARE-RIGGED SAILING VESSEL, AND THE MANNER OF HER HANDLING, HER VOYAGE-MAKING, HER PERSONNEL, HER ECONOMICS, HER PERFORMANCE, AND HER END… (mehr)

The Vendee Globe race is the
pinnacle for sailors who want to
push their racing skills to the limit.
It’s a race around the world in single-
man, very high-tech, fast sailboats
that stretch technology and human endurance
to their limits. The worst part of the
25,000-mile race is the Southern Ocean, where
waves reach unimaginable heights and the cold
is never ending. Virtually half the race, some
13,000 miles of it takes place in these nightmarish
conditions.
The 1996-1997 race was typical: of the fourteen
men and two women who began the race
one disappeared, another had to perform surgery
on his own elbow following an injury one (Goss) became an instant and certifiable hero
by beating his boat back against the wind to
locate and rescue a capsized comrade just before
death from exposure would have occurred
and three were wrecked.
Ironically, all who could, chose to finish the
race even if they had been disqualified. The
rules prohibit touching land except at the start
or the finish. Two of the racers chose to sail
back to the start, several thousand miles, for
repairs rather than risk disqualifications. Others
who were forced to stop for repairs continued
on just to be able to finish the race. Lundy
intersperses the intense high drama of his race
narrative with fascinating insights into the
world of the sailors and builders who spent millions
preparing for the race. “Visualize a
never-ending series of five- or six-story buildings,
with sloping sides of various angles. . .
moving toward the sailors at forty miles an
hour. Some of the time, the top one or two
stories will collapse on top of them.” Knockdowns,
where a boat is flattened on its side,
were common, and just the necessity of bracing
against walls to prevent being thrown about
was terribly wearing on the skippers.
Sleep was so important it became a technical
issue. Studies were conducted for many of
the skippers to determine just how little sleep
they could get by on and what times of day
and what length of time were best for short
naps. One discovered he could get by on six
hours of sleep in a twenty-four hour period and
could break it down into periods as short as
thirty minutes. That was the theory. In actual
practice, most got hardly any sleep at all. So
many things could interrupt their sleep.
Having to constantly brace oneself against
often irregular motions of the boat required the
development of new muscles and could be absolutely
exhausting. They needed constantly
to fix things that broke. The boats were all
mono-hulled and had a heavy keel that extended
below the bottom and would act like a
pendulum, righting the boat even after it capsized
— in theory — although those who had
been through it said their nervous systems
were never quite the same again. This movement
could also put tremendous strain on the
keel and the hull. The faster the boat, the less
likely it is to capsize — operating, I suspect,
similarly to a bicycle or motorcycle. They are
thinner and have less surface area for the
waves to pound on. They also right themselves
easier. Multi-hulled boats are more stable inverted
(but less likely to capsize), so skippers
of these craft will cut hatches in the bottom so
they can get out should one capsize. They also
learned to surf down the huge waves at an angle,
sometimes going twenty-five to thirty knots
down the waves. It’s important not to exceed
the maximum speed permitted by the autopilot,
because if it loses control all hell breaks
loose. Constantly monitoring how to attack
each enormous wave at just the right angle
can become very tiring. Pitch-poling
(remember Perfect Storm?) Where a boat
goes bow over stern is a real danger. Noise is
another problem. The boats are built of
very strong carbon fiber that has great strength
and lightness but transmits sound very well.
The noise of waves hitting the hull or even just
rushing by could be deafening and took time to
get used to it.
It’s a miracle that any of them made it back
given the horrible weather conditions, yet they
seem to thrive on the danger and lack of sleep,
all vowing to return again for the next Vendee
Glove. A wild ride for us armchair sailors.… (mehr)