"I know nothing that can give a better notion of infinity and eternity than the being upon the sea in a little vessel without anything in sight but yourself and the whole hemisphere."
Samuel Pepys, Secretary of the Navy and diarist, c. 1670.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
A Notion of Infinity
"I know nothing that can give a better notion of infinity and eternity than the being upon the sea in a little vessel without anything in sight but yourself and the whole hemisphere."
Samuel Pepys, Secretary of the Navy and diarist, c. 1670.
The Great Storm
That was the scariest night of all. The whole watch huddled below, not knowing what was happening, just two or three of us on deck because it was so rough.
We slept, of course. We were beyond tired, exhausted.
We dozed and grunted and snored and scratched ourselves through our heavy oilskins. The others told me that I always snored.
"Maybe I do," I said. "I never hear myself."
"You're lucky," said Kate bitterly.
She was 19 years old at that time.
I was nearly 60.
We couldn't read, because there was no light. We couldn't talk, because there were people round us in their hammocks, trying to sleep, people on different watches, with different obligations and duties.
Also, I am not sure we had anything new left to say to each other by that time. We had been at sea continuously for more than thirty days.
Suddenly I was called. I had to go up there, onto the deck. Something had gone wrong, one of my watchmates had been hurt - that's what I heard - I had to go up there. In a hurry, in an emergency - into sixty or seventy knots of wind, a big Southern Ocean storm, into a situation where the ship's officers wouldn't let all of the watch on deck simultaneously because it was too dangerous to be up there.
An interesting moment.
I went up onto the deck that night like a Spanish bull entering the arena, lumbering stupidly, looking side to side to find out what was necessary, to see what was happening. I was very determined and I thought it was an emergency. I was charged up.
The sight of the ocean made me sensible, made me consider.
A big storm at sea changes everything - the air fills with spume and spray - the shape of the waves changes - the way the boat moves is so sensational, so elemental, that you can't compare it with anything you've ever seen or experienced before. Big storms at sea remind you that you are very ordinary and extremely unimportant and small - a scrap of dust in a very large universe - you go out there on deck wanting to fight, wanting to confront the danger and do something and take control, but that is not how it works ........ a big storm at sea is something else.
You have to accept it.
The waves coming at us with the wind were immense - forty or more feet between peak and trough. Some of them were breaking beside us (which is when they get most dangerous). The whole world was grey and bitter and intense and severe and immensely beautiful. I will never forget how spectacularly beautiful it was. You could see nothing ahead, which didn't matter. We were several thousand miles from a shipping lane or anywhere you would expect to encounter a vessel. We were posting a lookout (just one, instead of the usual two) almost as a technicality. That night, we were on our own with the weather, with the storm.
It was, as I said, elemental.
That night, I went up and took over the helm in a hurry. JP had been steering and he had been hurt when his helm-mate had lost control for a minute. JP had been thrown right over the helm , the wheel, and off it. He was OK - shaken - but OK. The wheel on Endeavour is almost six foot in diameter. It had kicked back so savagely that JP had been thrown the whole way across the deck.
We were hove to, head to wind, trying not to go anywhere.
In that situation, all the helmsmen have to do is to point the ship's head against the direction of the sails. The ship is made to contradict herself, the rudder taking her in one direction the sails in another, which means she will stay locked head to wind, just drifting backwards. It should have been easy but that was a big, big storm, that night. Force Eleven, for anyone who know the Beaufort scale – that’s impressive, memorable. Just this side of a hurricane. About seventy knots of wind across the deck. Very dangerous indeed.
We were somewhere off the Western side of Chile, pitching through thirty or forty feet fore and aft, rolling at least 100 degrees from side to side. The cannons in the waist of the ship, the centre, were dipping in the water and nobody could walk down there even with the safety lines rigged - there was too much water coming on board. The lookout wasn't on the bow - he or she had to be up on the quarterdeck and it was still pretty wet and dangerous up there. You often had to duck.
In those conditions, the waves are grey and bright and white and utterly unpredictable; you can never tell which wave is going to come on board or when; and the spray on top of them will blow off , blow around all over the place; and it is pitch-black night as well. You couldn't see much at all, even the people beside you.
I could understand why the ship's officers wouldn't let the whole of the watch up on deck that night. The conditions were so fierce and thick that you could lose somebody over the side and not even realize they had gone until you called the roll at the end of the watch.
In the 36 hours it continued, that storm carried us nearly 200 miles to the North in exactly the direction we did not want to go. But we were lucky; none of the storms we encountered went on for more than 48 hours and, in that area, storms can go on for weeks rather than hours.
Then, once the storm had abated, we had to claw back down towards the Horn and out from the Chilean coast so that we wouldn't get embayed, pinned against that rocky coast by the prevailing wind and currents.
An old-fashioned square rigger like Endeavour simply will not sail upwind - it may manage to sail across the wind in reasonable conditions but, in a big wind the leeway is stupendous. The ship goes sideways very fast, probably into trouble.
If you get embayed there, pinned against the Chilean coast by the prevailing Westerlies, you are in danger even if you have big engines to help you.
We only had one useable engine, all the way across the Pacific from New Zealand, so we couldn't afford to get too close in to the coast.
An eighteenth or nineteenth century mariner, navigating just with a sextant and a compass, with no engines at all, needed to be very careful indeed if he approached Cape Horn from the West.
His ship was extremely vulnerable to navigational errors and it was almost impossible to know his position accurately a century or more before GPS became available.
When we reached Cape Horn, we had been 39 days out of sight of land and we had not seen the sun or any star for more than 18 days.
Also, I am not sure we had anything new left to say to each other by that time. We had been at sea continuously for more than thirty days.
Suddenly I was called. I had to go up there, onto the deck. Something had gone wrong, one of my watchmates had been hurt - that's what I heard - I had to go up there. In a hurry, in an emergency - into sixty or seventy knots of wind, a big Southern Ocean storm, into a situation where the ship's officers wouldn't let all of the watch on deck simultaneously because it was too dangerous to be up there.
An interesting moment.
I went up onto the deck that night like a Spanish bull entering the arena, lumbering stupidly, looking side to side to find out what was necessary, to see what was happening. I was very determined and I thought it was an emergency. I was charged up.
The sight of the ocean made me sensible, made me consider.
A big storm at sea changes everything - the air fills with spume and spray - the shape of the waves changes - the way the boat moves is so sensational, so elemental, that you can't compare it with anything you've ever seen or experienced before. Big storms at sea remind you that you are very ordinary and extremely unimportant and small - a scrap of dust in a very large universe - you go out there on deck wanting to fight, wanting to confront the danger and do something and take control, but that is not how it works ........ a big storm at sea is something else.
You have to accept it.
The waves coming at us with the wind were immense - forty or more feet between peak and trough. Some of them were breaking beside us (which is when they get most dangerous). The whole world was grey and bitter and intense and severe and immensely beautiful. I will never forget how spectacularly beautiful it was. You could see nothing ahead, which didn't matter. We were several thousand miles from a shipping lane or anywhere you would expect to encounter a vessel. We were posting a lookout (just one, instead of the usual two) almost as a technicality. That night, we were on our own with the weather, with the storm.
It was, as I said, elemental.
That night, I went up and took over the helm in a hurry. JP had been steering and he had been hurt when his helm-mate had lost control for a minute. JP had been thrown right over the helm , the wheel, and off it. He was OK - shaken - but OK. The wheel on Endeavour is almost six foot in diameter. It had kicked back so savagely that JP had been thrown the whole way across the deck.
We were hove to, head to wind, trying not to go anywhere.
In that situation, all the helmsmen have to do is to point the ship's head against the direction of the sails. The ship is made to contradict herself, the rudder taking her in one direction the sails in another, which means she will stay locked head to wind, just drifting backwards. It should have been easy but that was a big, big storm, that night. Force Eleven, for anyone who know the Beaufort scale – that’s impressive, memorable. Just this side of a hurricane. About seventy knots of wind across the deck. Very dangerous indeed.
We were somewhere off the Western side of Chile, pitching through thirty or forty feet fore and aft, rolling at least 100 degrees from side to side. The cannons in the waist of the ship, the centre, were dipping in the water and nobody could walk down there even with the safety lines rigged - there was too much water coming on board. The lookout wasn't on the bow - he or she had to be up on the quarterdeck and it was still pretty wet and dangerous up there. You often had to duck.
In those conditions, the waves are grey and bright and white and utterly unpredictable; you can never tell which wave is going to come on board or when; and the spray on top of them will blow off , blow around all over the place; and it is pitch-black night as well. You couldn't see much at all, even the people beside you.
I could understand why the ship's officers wouldn't let the whole of the watch up on deck that night. The conditions were so fierce and thick that you could lose somebody over the side and not even realize they had gone until you called the roll at the end of the watch.
In the 36 hours it continued, that storm carried us nearly 200 miles to the North in exactly the direction we did not want to go. But we were lucky; none of the storms we encountered went on for more than 48 hours and, in that area, storms can go on for weeks rather than hours.
Then, once the storm had abated, we had to claw back down towards the Horn and out from the Chilean coast so that we wouldn't get embayed, pinned against that rocky coast by the prevailing wind and currents.
An old-fashioned square rigger like Endeavour simply will not sail upwind - it may manage to sail across the wind in reasonable conditions but, in a big wind the leeway is stupendous. The ship goes sideways very fast, probably into trouble.
If you get embayed there, pinned against the Chilean coast by the prevailing Westerlies, you are in danger even if you have big engines to help you.
We only had one useable engine, all the way across the Pacific from New Zealand, so we couldn't afford to get too close in to the coast.
An eighteenth or nineteenth century mariner, navigating just with a sextant and a compass, with no engines at all, needed to be very careful indeed if he approached Cape Horn from the West.
His ship was extremely vulnerable to navigational errors and it was almost impossible to know his position accurately a century or more before GPS became available.
When we reached Cape Horn, we had been 39 days out of sight of land and we had not seen the sun or any star for more than 18 days.
Introduction
The Endeavour Replica, from Australia, is a beautiful square rigged ship, a re-creation of the vessel that Captain Cook commanded on his first great voyage of exploration.
She was built in Australia more than 20 years ago from the dockyard plans drawn nearly 250 years ago when Cook's ship was built.
Cook and his 93 officers, crew and supernumeraries left Deptford, in Britain on 26th. August, 1768.
Cook and his 93 officers, crew and supernumeraries left Deptford, in Britain on 26th. August, 1768.
He got more than 50 of them got back safely on 13th. July, 1771 which was a triumph.
In their three years away, Cook and his crew discovered and surveyed the whole of the East coast of Australia, from Botany Bay to Cape York.
They claimed Australia for the British crown and, less than a generation later, British people started to colonise Australia and to transform it.
They found out where the Great Barrier Reef is and survived to tell the tale (but only just).
They were the first British explorers to circumnavigate New Zealand and they built a temporary observatory in Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the sun and to take part in a ground-breaking international scientific experiment.
Cook brought most of his crew home alive in spite of malaria and dysentery, 'the bloody flux', which they picked up when they called at Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, (now Jakarta in Indonesia).
It was an extraordinary triumph and the Endeavour replica, built and created by Australians, commemorates the achievment.
Endeavour functions as a museum ship when tied up in port but, out at sea, even in very heavy weather, she is one of the most effective vessels you can imagine.
Peter Weir, the film director, spent time on board Endeavour when he was planning his film: "Master and Commander, the Far Side of the World".
He wrote that Endeavour is ".... the only replica vessel afloat that has a period-accurate lower deck .... you live as they did. You sleep in hammocks and work watches and go up the rigging ... it's just work, sleep, eat ... work, sleep eat. And you're working in a team."
He put a two-man film crew and a huge Panavision camera on board Endeavour to capture film footage of storms and the sea as she sailed around Cape Horn.
His crew filmed from the open deck of Endeavour, in nightmarish conditions, and I definitely recognized some of the biggest, wettest waves in 'Master and Commander', especially in the great storm when a boy is left to drown to save the ship.
I spent 166 days at sea on Endeavour in twelve months and sailed more than 18,000 miles.
When I was not too tired (which was often), there was time for reflection, for study and for experimenting with some of the old-fashioned navigational techniques which I still find fascinating.
But I also got very interested in the people who sailed with me.
This book is for my grand-children but it is also dedicated to my shipmates and to the memory of my Mother, who would have enjoyed the stories.
In their three years away, Cook and his crew discovered and surveyed the whole of the East coast of Australia, from Botany Bay to Cape York.
They claimed Australia for the British crown and, less than a generation later, British people started to colonise Australia and to transform it.
They found out where the Great Barrier Reef is and survived to tell the tale (but only just).
They were the first British explorers to circumnavigate New Zealand and they built a temporary observatory in Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the sun and to take part in a ground-breaking international scientific experiment.
Cook brought most of his crew home alive in spite of malaria and dysentery, 'the bloody flux', which they picked up when they called at Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, (now Jakarta in Indonesia).
It was an extraordinary triumph and the Endeavour replica, built and created by Australians, commemorates the achievment.
Endeavour functions as a museum ship when tied up in port but, out at sea, even in very heavy weather, she is one of the most effective vessels you can imagine.
Peter Weir, the film director, spent time on board Endeavour when he was planning his film: "Master and Commander, the Far Side of the World".
He wrote that Endeavour is ".... the only replica vessel afloat that has a period-accurate lower deck .... you live as they did. You sleep in hammocks and work watches and go up the rigging ... it's just work, sleep, eat ... work, sleep eat. And you're working in a team."
He put a two-man film crew and a huge Panavision camera on board Endeavour to capture film footage of storms and the sea as she sailed around Cape Horn.
His crew filmed from the open deck of Endeavour, in nightmarish conditions, and I definitely recognized some of the biggest, wettest waves in 'Master and Commander', especially in the great storm when a boy is left to drown to save the ship.
I spent 166 days at sea on Endeavour in twelve months and sailed more than 18,000 miles.
When I was not too tired (which was often), there was time for reflection, for study and for experimenting with some of the old-fashioned navigational techniques which I still find fascinating.
But I also got very interested in the people who sailed with me.
This book is for my grand-children but it is also dedicated to my shipmates and to the memory of my Mother, who would have enjoyed the stories.
Sailing the Bark
Endeavour in dry dock in 2002 - built like a barrel, to carry cargo, she also rolls like a barrel, most of the time; she is a very valiant vessel in rough seas and bad conditions but horribly uncomfortable for anyone with any tendency to suffer sea-sickness, that is - most normal people.
Endeavour is hard work. She always will be. There were a lot of improvements in the design, construction and operation of sailing ships in the 150 or more years after the Earl of Pembroke was built as a collier in Whitby, in 1764, and sold to the Admiralty and re-built and re-named Endeavour in for Captain Cook to navigate her to Tahiti and then to go on and venture into unknown lands and seek scientific information and, if possible, new colonies, rich new territories, to add to the British Empire.
The later ships had smaller sails and eventually a lot less need for manpower. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were steam-driven winches and mechanical devices which could help haul up the halyards and tension up the sheets. The big fast nineteenth century tea clippers like the celebrated Cutty Sark carried relatively small crews.
Working and living on Endeavour doesn't reflect any of these improvements, which is fascinating and something of a challenge if you are interested in how old ships worked and what the problems of managing them might have been.
N.A.M. Rodger's book, 'The Wooden World', is a delight to read and will tell you more about the eighteenth century British navy than you can possibly imagine or remember. It is the rock upon which most studies of that period are built.
If you read Rodger's book and go sailing on Endeavour (even for a few days) you will start to understand what Captain Cook and Nelson were up against and how they worked, lived and died.
Endeavour, with all sails set, in very light airs, somewhere in the Torres Strait in 2001.
On Endeavour, to set just one of the seven principal square sails on board takes about 20 people, which is more than one full watch by the time the lookouts have been posted, the wheel manned and the day's temporary galley assistant has gone to start his or her labours.
It takes more than forty minutes.
To set all the sails takes most of the ship's company much of a day.
Even furling one of the staysails can be hideously difficult when the ship is pitching and rolling.
There are ten staysails, spritsails and jibs to deal with in all. As we struggled with the main mast staysail, the most awkward sail on the ship, Bernard and I used to speculate repeatedly on what extremely wicked sins we must have committed in our previous lives to be made to suffer so, in penance!
The biggest square sails on Endeavour, the maincourse and forecourse, have more than a dozen lines attached, all of which need tending, hauling or belaying:
port and starboard sheets,
port and starboard tacks
port and starboard clews, bunts and reefs
port and starboard bowlines
port and starboard braces
port and starboard lifts
The main, foremast and mizzen mast topsails have halyards as well, to lift the topsail yards, which is the heaviest possible work on the ship. But the topsails do not have tacks, in opposition to their sheets.
Learning the ropes is one of the first things that voyage crew have to do when they come on board Endeavour. It's a real challenge. There are about 180 of them.
To my surprise (because I have a good memory for facts and documents and anything in writing) I found it very difficult to learn the ropes.
On the other hand, I always found it fairly easy to get to the right rope when we were actually working - it was the quizzes and line races on board which confused me. I could never put the names and positions of the lines satisfactorily together in my head though I could normally remember what they did and which way I had to run to reach them.
An unexpected difficulty and an odd confusion; but an additional insight into myself and my own weaknesses which, of course, is sometimes what the Endeavour experience is about - finding out about yourself and what you can do.
To raise the anchor by traditional methods, as we did on the BBC voyage in 2001, involved linking the anchor cable to a messenger cable attached to the capstan and recruiting twenty people or more to trudge round the capstan for two or more hours while10 or 15 other people attached the messenger cable, temporarily and repeatedly, to the anchor cable with the nipping lines, short pieces of rope cut and prepared just for that purpose.
The 'nippers' (the ship's boys) ran the nipping lines back and forth from the capstan back to the bows to re-cycle them.
Virtually the whole ship's company had to be involved apart from Caroline, the cook, and her assistant and the ship's officers.
It was an introduction to another age, an age when manpower was very cheap indeed, when machines built of wood and powered only by canvas, British naval vessels, could carry vast quantities of state-of-the-art firepower half way round the globe, sometimes safely, sometimes reliably, sometimes they got back home, and they could - because of their firepower, discipline and organization- take possession of great tracts of land in the Southern oceans, New Zealand and Australia, to name but two substantial tracts, with or without the agreement of the inhabitants.
I was very surprised that the BBC tv series "The Ship" did not show and discuss more of the extraordinary skills that the crew of the Endeavour replica, and the Captain of the Endeavour replica can deploy.
I was very impressed with all of them - as people and as craftsmen and women. They were remarkable.
The Captain when I sailed with Endeavour, Chris Blake, is a great man. He deserves his O.B.E.
The weird skills he deployed to motivate his (fast-changing) professional crews, to motivate and discipline his (paying) voyage crews as well, to keep the boat and its rigging in order - there are very few people in the world who could have kept all that together.
After that, he still had to sail the boat and to ensure it went in roughly the right direction, which he also did with great distinction and expertise.
The Captain losing his balance. It took me months to get this shot. It didn't happen often.
The Adventure Begins
My first glimpse of the bark Endeavour - August, 2001
July 2001 was when the adventure began for me but this book is about my second passage on Endeavour, starting in February, 2002.
No time, on the web, to put up a complete account of my whole journey - that belongs in the printed version, so let's jump ahead to when the ship was (nearly) at Cape Horn:
31/3 - Sunday - Easter Sunday
I have kept the tiny Easter card, which, with a few miniature chocolate eggs, Fleur and Camilla presented me with when I was going on watch today. It meant a lot at the time – it was like a sort of affirmation, almost a permanent or lasting hug or gentle kiss, and I got one of those as well.
Affection is something I crave out here, though there is a lot of friendship.
I wrote another draft e-mail for my family and friends, to send whenever I can:
Sunday 31st. March
Endeavour was at 55 degrees 43 minutes South, 115 degrees 19 minutes West at noon yesterday. We have sailed 3023 miles since we left Bluff, in New Zealand, and we have about 1,500 to go to Cape Horn (and 11,000 to Whitby.)
The daily runs this week have been as little as 68.5 miles and as much as 169.5. Our progress is dominated and often interrupted by the erratic and changeable weather. Low pressure systems sweep up astern of us and usually give us high winds and big seas and push us forward. High pressure systems dominate when the lows pass but they give us calm or quiet conditions.
We are using our one remaining engine quite regularly when the ship’s speed through the water drops below about three knots. Between noon on 27/3 and noon on 28/3, we did not sail at all but covered 115 miles at an average of 4.7 knots under power alone.
We have seen no more icebergs or whales this week and it has not been vilely cold but cold in a normal, civilized way so that our teeth chatter only gently and most of our extremities remain detectable.
I am still not wearing my thermal underwear and socks, but I am thinking seriously about them.
Once I put them on, I have nothing left in reserve.
The wind was heavy on Thursday and the seas were huge – more than thirty feet and breaking close to us. The ship was heaving and pitching violently and it was so dangerous on deck that we mustered and spent our watch in the cramped area called ‘the Marines’, down below.
Only three members of the watch (two on the helm and one on bow watch, by the starboard cannon) were exposed outside to the elements at any one time. We were hove to and drifted Northwards for many hours, with an Easterly gusting at more than 70 knots in our teeth.
That storm was an impressive, awe-inspiring sight. I won’t forget it. But last night, sailing with almost all available sails set in winds from 19-40 knots, was even better.
The ship roared along, in roughly the right direction, with rather too much sail set, healing determinedly to port and pushing gallons of white water to each side, waves breaking under her bluff, aggressive bows, twenty foot surfing waves rolling past her hull as if they were playing with us.
The wind was on the starboard quarter and there was lots of it.
When the moon came out from behind the broken clouds, it lit up the water like a pathway to another universe.
“It just can’t get any fucking better,” said Nigel Longster, one of my watchmates, shaking his head at the moonshine. “You could read a book by this.”
A few of the stars showed themselves.
Alpha and Beta Centauri clearly pointed to the Southern Cross before we could see it, then the Cross itself glimmered through the clouds, a pointer in the sky.
“My favourite constellation,” said Nigel, looking up. “My favourite fucking constellation.”
One of the stay sails started flapping and the lead helmsman called for more starboard helm to bring the ship back up to the wind.
“Seven to starboard. Quickly!”
The helmsmen were panting as they heaved the wheel around.
“Seven to starboard. On!” said the helmsman’s mate and he relaxed.
“You think it’s good,” said Nigel with something like joy in his voice. “You think it’s so fucking good.”
He paused.
“And then it gets fucking better.”
Nigel Longster was one of the gang going all the way to Whitby.
He's a very likeable, much bearded New Zealander, who lives in Queensland, in Australia and rides a Harley Davidson and keeps bull terriers and works in a brewery and is covered all over with tattoos.
His father went to sea from Whitby and ended up in New Zealand and settled there. His grandfather and eight uncles, his father’s brothers, all went to sea as well. He expects quite a reception in Staithes, just North of Whitby, where many of his relatives still live.
Nigel looks gruff or even grumpy. His heavy beard hides his mouth and reaches up towards his eyes. But he laughs a lot. His smile is very kind. The young women on board seem to adore him.
If he is suggestive (and he is) it is always with a smile and laughter – backed by honest admiration. He hides a kind heart behind a very grumpy beard.
On board Endeavour, the space in your locker is all the space you own and entirely control. It is very precious.
Your locker is like a little island inside a cupboard where your personality hides and resides and where you can be yourself. It’s the one place where the routines and the rules of the ship can’t reach you.
If my locker were big enough, I would sleep inside it sometimes, just to get away from everyone.
This week, I have been having trouble with my locker, which is disastrous.
Seawater has been leaking in, because of the very rough weather.
My locker contains almost everything I brought with me – important and relatively valuable things like my sextant and my big camera; things of personal importance like my notebooks, good luck cards, memorabilia and money; books I want to read; all my clean clothes, underpants, dry socks and reserve sweaters.
Also, my precious pristine thermal underwear.
At the morning meeting on Friday, I drew the attention of the Chief Officer to the fact that my locker was leaking.
“All wooden ships leak,” he said, and passed on to other topics.
I am uncertain what to do next.
But I have wrapped everything possible in plastic bags.
1/4 - Monday
‘Mizzling’ as in mizzling rain – drizzle? An expression used by Captain Marryat in Mr. Midshipman Easy, a childhood book which I have just re-read with much enjoyment.
What a lovely adjective!
2/4 - Tuesday 0855
Miserable conditions, calm, heavy overcast, mizzling rain, barometer falling like a stone. Tetchy today. Middle Watch starting to bite again? Sleep deprivation kicking in again?
Endurance, that’s it. Endurance, survival, self-abnegation. Strength though denial.
My mother died ten years ago today – and I only remembered, three quarters of the way through the morning meeting. She would like to see me here and to know about it but I am glad she is no longer alone, without my father’s company and presence. She missed him terribly, her last three years.
3/4 - Wednesday
After the sad monotony of yesterday, two watches full of incident, excitement and beauty.
On middle watch, in near darkness, the mad arc of the mainmast curved down towards the sea through a sky brindled with dim moonlight above a sea spewing with violence.
A wave travelled the quarterdeck at head height, caught us all by surprise; my clothes are still wet from it 12 hrs. later (nothing will dry – our mess deck is awash as well as the lavatories).
Some gusts of wind were more than 45 knots. It snowed this morning, stinging the face and naked hands, streaming horizontally across the windswept decks.
This afternoon, the sun is bright and small rainbows form in the spray by the blustering bow. Alex and Craig whoop when a big wave hits. Even I smile or laugh when I see it.
The seascape is a meadow of beauty, the waves gallop through it like wild horses, tossing their white bright manes.
Snapshots in my head:
Rushing onto the deck in the great storm just as the bow of the boat pitched precipitously down the front of a great wave and into the chasm behind. The angle of pitch, fore and aft? 50 or 60 degrees? I could barely stay on my feet.
Another snapshot:
The crazy geometry of the furled mizzen topsail, crojack brace and mizzen course, silhouetted against the magic billows of the main course and main topsail as the two masts swing like mad fishing rods across the glimmer and glitter of the fierce sky and the torrential sea from starboard to port and the driving waves speed noisily beneath the hull.
A final snapshot:
Craig, when he spotted the killer whales bombing towards us, arms wide, knees bent, thumbs up, a great smile, dark glasses.
“Yes!”
Jubilance in every gesture.
4/4 - Thursday
Very cold on the eighteenth century deck this morning.
“This journey brought to you by the words ‘fucking’ and ‘cold’,” muttered Alex, shivering.
“Take me back to Queensland,” said Nigel, who stayed in his hammock till the last possible moment.
“I’ll be on the same bus,” said the Captain later at breakfast.
Chris Blake likes the hot weather too – don’t we all?
Barometric Pressure very very low at 972. Storm force winds expected.
Wind now from the South – up to 62-65 knots (apparent), more than 70 true. Running North with it behind us.
Turning up to reach across it (and make a better course) carries too much risk of broaching.
5/4 - Friday
Routine day yesterday – mizzling and cold in the afternoon, the same at midnight (we were down in the Marines again).
On the helm in the last hour of Middle Watch, the wind built steadily towards 40 and 45 and the ship howled along with everything set except the mizzen mast sails.
She continued to sail like that when we went down to sleep but all hands were called up during breakfast to hand or furl the topsails and get control again – the wind was over 60 knots and the seas were marvellous to watch – fascinating and startling, sparkling with light and life.
“Oh, que c’est apre, que c’est dur.”
Persephone? Stravinsky?
(How harsh it is, how hard)
Svetlana Beriosova read the narration in the recording that I remember.
I met her, once or twice, when Zoe Dominic and I were working on a book about Frederick Ashton. Zoe knew her well and she was a wonderful dancer, in her prime, particularly in Giselle.
Good to remember the warmth and luxury and the beauty of the Royal Opera House, where I once spent so much time.
Especially out here.
5/4 – Friday (continued) 1648
The whole day has seen us hurtling NE (not the direction we want) in great style (staysails and forecourse only) – I was on the helm and it was very invigorating but I have no idea what speed we were doing. The waves were about 20-25 feet, the wind up to 45 knots and more.
Rough and wild seas – treacherous underfoot.
Fell twice yesterday – once spectacularly on the quarterdeck, flat on my front over the tiller, sliding towards the scuppers, the second landing in the box of sea boots at the top of the stairs down to the galley. A few more bruises in unexpected places, a nasty twinge in my left knee, which I seem to have twisted.
I was lucky to get away with the first fall - it was by far the worst yet.
196 degrees true (wind) – the first time a storm has gone on for more than 24 hours.
The sun shone brightly for most of the day but I wouldn’t risk my sextant on deck to take a reading.
6/4 - Saturday 0845
Great middle watch 40-50 knots steering 110-120 on the wind.
Helming about 400 tons of ship at 7 or more knots (teamed up with Kate and Bernard) was an excellent experience.
What a privilege! What a WONDERFUL ship!
Verses for my new Cape Horn song:
It’s dark tonight, the Horn’s still not in sight
the waves are huge, the sea’s all white
6/4 - Saturday
Afternoon watch was spectacular. The ocean is very lively. Bernard and I had volunteered to relieve the galley crew and make lunch for everyone tomorrow but I think the Catering Officer and the Captain think it's a bit too rough for the two of us to gobble about in the galley all day Sunday so I will get my lay day rest (which I badly need.) I am quite relieved. I was going to make 'bigos', which is a hunter's stew from Poland. Mixed meats and mushrooms, loads of garlic and red wine. Very nice indeed - but in these conditions? Could have been testing. And I am tired again. Terribly tired.
7/4 - Sunday
Writing this on middle watch at about 0140 – I am in the nav. room watching the radar.
The seas build and build as the storm continues (three days now) – windspeed 30-50, all from the SE and the ship rolls horribly. It is difficult to sleep, even in a hammock.
Then, when you are very tired, it is difficult to do ordinary things, to make tea, to get dressed, to move about safely, to sling your hammock.
JP fell out of his hammock and hurt himself a lot (he had not tied it on properly but, as he pointed out, what does he know about knots? He is a computer whizz. He should have been shown how to do it at one of the introductory sessions but I wonder if he was - we left Fremantle in such a hurry, perhaps there were no introductory sessions).
Tig and Ally fell heavily as well and they are young and fit and professional and should be able to look after themselves.
I have been quite lucky so far, and careful. I haven't hurt myself badly.
8/4 - Monday
Famous last words?
I fell down the companion way into the twentieth century mess this morning – in front of 90% of the crew.
Only dignity suffered. My own fault, too. Those leather shoelaces on my boat shoes again. Must tie them properly, make sure they're shorter. Otherwise the ends get under your feet and you slither about on them, it's like being on roller skates.
Overcast today – no sights (again)
Storm passed, the Cape Horn song almost completed.
The albatrosses swoop and soar
The whales sneak past – wish we’d seen more
Lay day very welcome yesterday and Alex no longer the watchleader – glad about that. I didn’t like having to argue with him or ask anything of him.
8/4 - Monday (continued) around 2100
Routine day – now on morning watch, 0400-0800, 1600-2000.
With additional sail-handling, tonight, (we've just finished) that amounts to seventeen and a half hours without a proper break.
All the watches are bad, but I think morning watch is probably the most exhausting.
However, I skived off this afternoon – instead of helping with maintenance, I learned to operate Martin’s video camera.
Trivial Pursuit this evening.
It infuriates me.
If you can answer the questions, they’re banal, if you can’t they’re humiliating.
Mark you, it helps if you are winning (and we weren't). You don't feel so bad about it then!
In the army and in prison, the first thing to happen is that the conscript or inmate is allocated a number and loses control of most or all of his or her private possessions and timetable.
How curious – the same things happen on Endeavour. I am number four in foremast Watch. I identify myself in this way at least four times per day, at the beginning and end of each watch and sometimes in between. Does it de-personalise you? Do you lose a little bit of your identity each time you call the number instead of answering to your name?
In a curious sort of way, neither personality nor achievments matter much out here. As I wrote before, it is simply a question of whether you can cope. Can you look after yourself and your clothes on board, keep yourself clean and fed, get enough sleep, turn up punctually on watch, climb the masts or haul the halyards when you need to.
Can you hack it?
It should be the Endeavour's motto.
Interesting to reflect that a 19 year old like Kate may never normally take responsibility for her own wardrobe, schedule, routine etc. Kate's been on Endeavour before but she still manages to be late on watch occasionally and I lend her my torch sometimes, when we're kitting up, because she's always lost or mislaid some item of apparel or equipment.
Spoke to one of the officers the other day – claimed one bad day, on passage, would be pretty normal for me, one bad day on a long passage, when I really didn't think I wanted to be out there.
She thought that was a good average. (So do I).
On this trip, it would be more like one bad day in four.
Pete the Fish new watchleader – good!
They all do one week each - Kate's next, I think - and I have declined to do it.
I used to spend a lot of time managing people and taking responsibility for them. That is not what I am out here to do now, rather the opposite.
9/4 – Tues. 1205
Mizzling rain again – grey overcast – horrible!
No sights poss. Calmish. Magnetic course 080
Haven’t climbed for ages – climbed twice today (main course unreefed, mizzen topsail furled) – can’t say I liked it esp. in pouring rain (main) or pitch dark (mizzen top). However, I can do it.
Also got stuck on the helm (as ‘muscles’) for nearly three hours .... not happy with that – Pete the Fish seemed to have forgotten I was there!
10/4
Pete's first suggestion this morning was that I should go back on the helm as 'muscles'.
I declined, so he put me on as 'brains' instead – just as tiring but a bit more stimulating ....
44,000 containers per year fall overboard! Wow!
Obviously, most of them sink. But it would be possible, even in Endeavour, to get completely wiped out if you hit a floating container at speed.
In the middle of the Indian Ocean, Dan and I were gliding along in our tiny (steel) boat in smooth seas with a light breeze on our quarter when there was suddenly a distinct heavy thump at the bow and a grinding noise along our starboard side. We rushed on deck.
A large log - the bottom half of a big mango tree - was drifting out behind us.
We had hit it fair and square, despite the vast expanses of water which surrounded us. (We were more than a thousand miles from land in any direction.)
Fortunately, the sea was calm, the wind was slight. We hit it nice and slowly.
But if we had been tearing along in a big wind, surfing down the front of a wave at 12 or 13 knots, that log could have made a severe impression even on a metal hulled boat and might have holed and sunk a glass fibre yacht.
The tree stump was about 6 feet by 8 feet in section (48 square feet) and the area of our bow was about 3 feet by 7 feet (21 square feet).
How these two small surfaces managed to find each other and to make contact is still a mystery to me. The chances of it happening seem so very remote.
more verses of the song, particularly:
"it’s morning now, the sea is blue
the storm’s blown through and the world is new"
I wonder who can sing it for me? Lucy was so terrific last time, in 2001. I need to find someone like her.
Later I proposed to Tiffany that she should sing it – a resounding lack of enthusiasm ensued.
10/4 - Wednesday
Oh dear! Heading West! (and a little North) - quite the wrong direction!
We approached the Chilean coast, close enough to spot the loom of a lighthouse beam from one of the Evangelista Islands but the wind remained obstinately in the South with a little East in it as well – exactly the direction in which we have to go to get round the Horn.
Rather than be trapped on a lee shore, we wore ship and turned away (heading, the Captain told us in joke, directly for Tahiti).
We may spend days to-ing and fro-ing like this, but I hope not. Everyone has the Channels already, cabin fever – they have all been anticipating the landfalls, at the Horn and Port Stanley, since the day we left Bluff.
Also, food is running short. No fruit now for days and days – no more biscuits on night watch.
A poem, not a song:
The West wind strokes the seas and kisses skies
As I would like to stroke a woman’s thighs
Gently and often, lovingly and bold,
Inflamed, enraptured, passionate - and cold
(Another six lines written and in notebook – could make a sonnet? But I think the extra lines weaken it rather than add to it. Maybe I will look at it again sometime.)
This wind will stroke the sea and kiss the sky
When woman, thighs and I in earth will lie
(And not together more’s the pity!)
11/4 - Thursday
Overcast, barometric pressure rising, South wind – tried wearing at 0845 when the wind seemed to be veering – however, the best poss. course we could achieve afterwards was 070 M, to the North of East, ie No Bloody Good.
We wore back, promptly and are still heading West with no windshift likely.
12/4 - Friday - 1430
52 38 S – 76 45 W
Two days ago we were further South and West than this (53 20S 75 32 W) – we have made no progress at all and our current course is 89-93 True, which will take us into the Straits of Magellan but not round the Horn. It is still completely overcast and we are now less than 70 miles off Desolation Island in the Archipelago Reina Adelaida in about 400-1555 fathoms, with no hope of finding soundings before we hit the rocks.
We would be in grave danger with only Dead Reckoning and my sextant to guide us. (We haven't seen the sun for days and days). How would I play it, if I were the only navigator and there was no GPS on board?
13/4 - Saturday – 0635
Thick overcast – viz down to 1-1.5 miles.
Course about 150M, variation 16-18 East. So we are making South, as we want, at 6-7 knots over the ground with a Force 4-5 breeze on our starboard quarter.
Stood by at noon, with Gerald, to try for a noon sight – but the sun was completely concealed, there was no point in even bringing the sextant on deck.
By accident, just this morning, I came across an article by Skip Novak about navigating the second Whitbread Round the World Race, in 1977. What I saw was a print out of the Cape Horn Article from the web-site www.pelagic.co.uk.
In the article, he describes approaching Cape Horn from the West as we are doing, in overcast conditions. He sees a break in the clouds, grabs a sun-sight, comps it. Two hours later, another break in the clouds, another observation, another set of calculations.
He crosses the two position lines (which have only a 30 degree angle of cut) and deduces from this scanty evidence that his estimated latitude is spot on and that the vessel is (jubilantly) 40 miles further down their track (ie nearer the Horn) than his DR had implied. “We were ten miles north of our supposed track and a healthy forty miles ahead of schedule.”
If your actual position is ahead of your DR, you are in great danger if the skies are overcast and you are running down onto a lee shore. Also, two position lines with only two hours between them are not much by way of hard evidence.
You have to have a lot of balls to navigate that way – but, of course, at that time, there was no alternative. You either navigated on the edge like that or you stayed at home.
14/4 Sunday
On the bow by myself early this morning. Delightful. Thrilling. The ship is so beautiful. In detail as well as in outline, in close up as well as in long shot.
I looked at it and loved it, suddenly, with different eyes - observing things I had seen many times with fresh perception.
I wrote this in my notebook on deck. My fingers got very very cold very quickly. Otherwise, I would have written more:
"Everything on the deck around me is functional, hand-crafted, beautifully appropriate and much-handled, worn and scarred with constant use.
This is a living, working museum-piece, which we inhabit and use. I feel very content and fortunate – even the noise of the waves is muted and soothing."
How little I write about sounds and smells in these journals. Nothing about the food either.
Curious omissions?
Everyone else who writes about sailing mentions the noise of the wind in the rigging, especially in stormy conditions.
But I was not very conscious of it, either because I was deafened by all the garments I wore on my head to keep myself warm or (more likely?) that my nearly sixty year old hearing apparatus minimised the high frequency sounds, the whistling and howling sounds, that surround me.
I must ask a younger crew member, Craig, perhaps, about the sounds and how he remembers them.
As for smell - there must have been a variety of strong odours on the eighteenth century deck where we all slept and worked and lived.
The hatch to the deck had to be closed for most of our time crossing the Pacific. A stranger would undoubtedly have sniffed disbelievingly, if suddenly finding him or herself in our midst. Socks, feet, trainers, underwear, damp clothes, sleeping bags, intestinal emissions (farts) ...... not to speak of the smell of the sail cloth, the warps, the equipment and stores of tar and varnish with which we also shared the space.
And yet I do not remember the smells and I make no comments about them at all, in any of the notebooks.
I suppose I just got used to them.
0738
Wallowing in a light Southerly a few miles off Gilbert island, Stewart island and Londonderry island. About 40 miles off shore. We might see the nearest peak (8,000 feet) a little later. Cape Horn is within reach now – perhaps 150 miles away. It is bitterly cold and horribly calm. Barometric pressure (BP) is steady or rising.
We are going to make it.
Heavy Weather
When I came back from Endeavour, I sometimes lectured about what I had been up to. I couldn't do it very often because I was trying to earn a living, settle in again, write this book. But it was interesting and enlivening. People liked hearing about it all.
I normally used to read this account of the worst night on board as the climax of my lectures. I sometimes found it hard to get through it. It brought back too much terror.
I went on deck in a hurry, wearing Antarctic thermals and a lot of other warm clothing. I wore three pairs of gloves and, on my head, a thermal balaklava underneath a woollen hat underneath the heavy waterproof hood of my breathable Burke waterproofs which were covered in tar from the work that we do on deck on a long voyage.
I counted once, when we were in the Southern Ocean, and found that I was wearing a total of 21 different garments (pairs of socks and boots and gloves count as one).
We had waves thirty five foot high rolling the ship from side to side as if she were a fairground attraction or a barrel going down Niagara Falls. We needed to shorten sail urgently. The temperature was about -20 degrees Centigrade by the time you allowed for the wind chill factor.
That night, the wind was gusting above fifty knots as I started clumsily - because of all those layers of clothes - to climb the shrouds which hold up the main mast of the bark called Endeavour.
I wondered, not for the first time - what on earth made me want to do this? Why ever did I come out here? How did my life change so much?
Our task was to take in and furl the biggest sail on board and we had done it many times before. But, that night, the conditions were extreme. It was dark, it was very rough, it was liable to be frightening and dangerous - more dangerous than usual. About fourteen of us were involved - most of my mates from foremast watch and some of the group called 'the idlers', members of the professional crew who work very hard (they're not idle at all) but who don't stand watches every day; they are called up on deck only in emergency, when things get tough, because they are good sailors, good workers, and fit and young.
I was 59 years old at that time. I had spent most of my life in sedentary occupations, producing and directing radio and television programmes, writing scripts and plays and novels, running a restaurant, helping people with IT problems.
I had always been the boss of all my enterprises and now I was just another ordinary crew member on Endeavour, at everyone's beck and call, liable to be summoned to furl or set sail at any time of the day or night.
I have always valued my privacy and my solitude above everything.
On Endeavour, I had to sling my hammock in 14 inches of space on the main deck where 30 other people sleep.
I have always disliked heights and now I am climbing the main mast of a replica of an eighteenth century ship in gale force winds.
What on earth happened, to change my life into this? Who or what inspired me to do something so demanding and so seemingly masochistic and so life-enhancing and special?
It was pitch black that night. I had taken off my glasses because it was raining as well as blowing. I had got used to working largely by feel when it was dark or when it rained, when things were difficult and I wouldn't be able see through my glasses.
I climbed the shrouds, the standing rigging, without any major problems. I had done it lots of time before and we were on the windward side, which meant the wind was behind us. There's no safety line when you are climbing - you could fall off, onto the deck or into the sea quite easily and Captain Cook lost people like that - but we were being blown on to the shrouds, which are like tarred manilla rope ladders and, because we were going to work on the main sail, we didn't have to struggle up the overhang of what are called the futtock shrouds, to reach the fighting top and climb higher and deal with the topsail.
All we had to do was to leave the safety of the mast, step out on to the main yard, on to the foot rope, and clip our waist belt on to the line on top of the yard itself.
Then we could get to work in reasonable confidence, knowing that we were attached to something strong, that the cold wind swirling energetically about us would not carry us away, that even if the sail blew up at us and knocked us off the foot rope, we wouldn't fall far or hurt ourselves seriously.
That is the theory, at any rate.
In fact, for a tall, heavy man like me to fall even a few feet off the main yard in a big wind and a big sea would have been very very uncomfortable, potentially life-threatening, terrifying. The waist belt would probably ride up over your ribs and might break one or two. You'd be wrenched and twisted by the wind in all sorts of unexpected directions. Flailing around to get yourself back onto a secure footing would be a major struggle and climbing down again could be a big problem. The shock effect of even a small fall would be huge.
That night, my own safety was a priority. I wanted to do the work, to get the sail in (fast!) but my own survival was what I thought about first. When you are my age, you know that you can die, that you can hurt yourself. When you are young, like Eric Newby writing about his experiences in 'The Last Great Grain Race', or Dana writing about life at sea in 'Two Years Before the Mast', you do anything aloft or on shore without thinking how dangerous it is, because you don't understand risk - you don't feel that you are vulnerable, in fact you are sure that you will live forever.
That feeling passes, once you are about forty or when your joints start to creak a little and you get long-sighted and can't read the newspaper without glasses because your arms aren't long enough.
That night, I had to step out onto the footrope of the main yard from the relative security of the main mast. It should have been easy. I had done it lots of times before.
Pete the Fish, a professional sailor from New Zealand, was in front of me, and he did it. Bernard, who is a waiter, born in France but now living in Sydney in Australia, was in front of me and he did it. I got to the stepping off point and gasped and froze completely. The yard wasn't square, wasn't braced at the usual 90 degrees angle to the mast. It was at an oblique angle instead, and that meant that on the port side, where I was, it seemed that the 'step' I was supposed to take was seven or eight feet long.
We were 50 or 60 feet up and the boat was rolling and the wind was howling and the waves were sending spume and foam almost up to our level. There was a whole gang of people behind me, wondering why I had stopped moving forward.
I looked at the yard and I tried to swing around the back of the rigging to find the platform which would bring me closer to it and allow me to step on to it.
I couldn't understand how the guys in front had made it on to the yard at all. I couldn't crack it. Either because I didn't have my glasses on or because the people in front were much more limber than me, I could not get on the yard on that side, on that night.
I climbed round to the starboard side instead, not without difficulty under those conditions, but then the wind was trying to pluck me off the ship and the roll of the ship was heavier in that direction so again survival was the name of the game. But the step onto the yard was much shorter there, just a couple of feet, and I got out onto the foot rope and clipped on and started to help, thinking all the time of my own safety as well as what I was doing, making sure that I was as secure as you can be in a gale force wind up the mast of a ship rolling through more than ninety degrees. "One hand for the ship," goes the saying, "and one for yourself."
Or, as Dana wrote, in the nineteenth century:
(Under-manned and in a storm close to Cape Horn, he and his mates attempt to furl the main course, the biggest, heaviest sail.)
”We had need of every finger that God gave us.”
Elsewhere, he refers to a ship-mate:
“He was a true sailor, every finger a fish-hook.”
That night, on Endeavour, we needed all our fishhook-fingers and even our eyelashes just to hold on, to protect ourselves, and the work was very slow, but we got the sail in eventually and made a reasonable job of it - the furl looked quite respectable in the morning, in the light of next day's dawn. There were no big bundles, like dead cows, hiding under the canvas 'skin' on the outside of the neatly rolled up sail.
I normally used to read this account of the worst night on board as the climax of my lectures. I sometimes found it hard to get through it. It brought back too much terror.
I went on deck in a hurry, wearing Antarctic thermals and a lot of other warm clothing. I wore three pairs of gloves and, on my head, a thermal balaklava underneath a woollen hat underneath the heavy waterproof hood of my breathable Burke waterproofs which were covered in tar from the work that we do on deck on a long voyage.
I counted once, when we were in the Southern Ocean, and found that I was wearing a total of 21 different garments (pairs of socks and boots and gloves count as one).
We had waves thirty five foot high rolling the ship from side to side as if she were a fairground attraction or a barrel going down Niagara Falls. We needed to shorten sail urgently. The temperature was about -20 degrees Centigrade by the time you allowed for the wind chill factor.
That night, the wind was gusting above fifty knots as I started clumsily - because of all those layers of clothes - to climb the shrouds which hold up the main mast of the bark called Endeavour.
I wondered, not for the first time - what on earth made me want to do this? Why ever did I come out here? How did my life change so much?
Our task was to take in and furl the biggest sail on board and we had done it many times before. But, that night, the conditions were extreme. It was dark, it was very rough, it was liable to be frightening and dangerous - more dangerous than usual. About fourteen of us were involved - most of my mates from foremast watch and some of the group called 'the idlers', members of the professional crew who work very hard (they're not idle at all) but who don't stand watches every day; they are called up on deck only in emergency, when things get tough, because they are good sailors, good workers, and fit and young.
I was 59 years old at that time. I had spent most of my life in sedentary occupations, producing and directing radio and television programmes, writing scripts and plays and novels, running a restaurant, helping people with IT problems.
I had always been the boss of all my enterprises and now I was just another ordinary crew member on Endeavour, at everyone's beck and call, liable to be summoned to furl or set sail at any time of the day or night.
I have always valued my privacy and my solitude above everything.
On Endeavour, I had to sling my hammock in 14 inches of space on the main deck where 30 other people sleep.
I have always disliked heights and now I am climbing the main mast of a replica of an eighteenth century ship in gale force winds.
What on earth happened, to change my life into this? Who or what inspired me to do something so demanding and so seemingly masochistic and so life-enhancing and special?
It was pitch black that night. I had taken off my glasses because it was raining as well as blowing. I had got used to working largely by feel when it was dark or when it rained, when things were difficult and I wouldn't be able see through my glasses.
I climbed the shrouds, the standing rigging, without any major problems. I had done it lots of time before and we were on the windward side, which meant the wind was behind us. There's no safety line when you are climbing - you could fall off, onto the deck or into the sea quite easily and Captain Cook lost people like that - but we were being blown on to the shrouds, which are like tarred manilla rope ladders and, because we were going to work on the main sail, we didn't have to struggle up the overhang of what are called the futtock shrouds, to reach the fighting top and climb higher and deal with the topsail.
All we had to do was to leave the safety of the mast, step out on to the main yard, on to the foot rope, and clip our waist belt on to the line on top of the yard itself.
Then we could get to work in reasonable confidence, knowing that we were attached to something strong, that the cold wind swirling energetically about us would not carry us away, that even if the sail blew up at us and knocked us off the foot rope, we wouldn't fall far or hurt ourselves seriously.
That is the theory, at any rate.
In fact, for a tall, heavy man like me to fall even a few feet off the main yard in a big wind and a big sea would have been very very uncomfortable, potentially life-threatening, terrifying. The waist belt would probably ride up over your ribs and might break one or two. You'd be wrenched and twisted by the wind in all sorts of unexpected directions. Flailing around to get yourself back onto a secure footing would be a major struggle and climbing down again could be a big problem. The shock effect of even a small fall would be huge.
That night, my own safety was a priority. I wanted to do the work, to get the sail in (fast!) but my own survival was what I thought about first. When you are my age, you know that you can die, that you can hurt yourself. When you are young, like Eric Newby writing about his experiences in 'The Last Great Grain Race', or Dana writing about life at sea in 'Two Years Before the Mast', you do anything aloft or on shore without thinking how dangerous it is, because you don't understand risk - you don't feel that you are vulnerable, in fact you are sure that you will live forever.
That feeling passes, once you are about forty or when your joints start to creak a little and you get long-sighted and can't read the newspaper without glasses because your arms aren't long enough.
That night, I had to step out onto the footrope of the main yard from the relative security of the main mast. It should have been easy. I had done it lots of times before.
Pete the Fish, a professional sailor from New Zealand, was in front of me, and he did it. Bernard, who is a waiter, born in France but now living in Sydney in Australia, was in front of me and he did it. I got to the stepping off point and gasped and froze completely. The yard wasn't square, wasn't braced at the usual 90 degrees angle to the mast. It was at an oblique angle instead, and that meant that on the port side, where I was, it seemed that the 'step' I was supposed to take was seven or eight feet long.
We were 50 or 60 feet up and the boat was rolling and the wind was howling and the waves were sending spume and foam almost up to our level. There was a whole gang of people behind me, wondering why I had stopped moving forward.
I looked at the yard and I tried to swing around the back of the rigging to find the platform which would bring me closer to it and allow me to step on to it.
I couldn't understand how the guys in front had made it on to the yard at all. I couldn't crack it. Either because I didn't have my glasses on or because the people in front were much more limber than me, I could not get on the yard on that side, on that night.
I climbed round to the starboard side instead, not without difficulty under those conditions, but then the wind was trying to pluck me off the ship and the roll of the ship was heavier in that direction so again survival was the name of the game. But the step onto the yard was much shorter there, just a couple of feet, and I got out onto the foot rope and clipped on and started to help, thinking all the time of my own safety as well as what I was doing, making sure that I was as secure as you can be in a gale force wind up the mast of a ship rolling through more than ninety degrees. "One hand for the ship," goes the saying, "and one for yourself."
Or, as Dana wrote, in the nineteenth century:
(Under-manned and in a storm close to Cape Horn, he and his mates attempt to furl the main course, the biggest, heaviest sail.)
”We had need of every finger that God gave us.”
Elsewhere, he refers to a ship-mate:
“He was a true sailor, every finger a fish-hook.”
That night, on Endeavour, we needed all our fishhook-fingers and even our eyelashes just to hold on, to protect ourselves, and the work was very slow, but we got the sail in eventually and made a reasonable job of it - the furl looked quite respectable in the morning, in the light of next day's dawn. There were no big bundles, like dead cows, hiding under the canvas 'skin' on the outside of the neatly rolled up sail.
Cape Horn at last .....
16/4 – Tuesday - dawn, at Cape Horn
I can not believe it. We are there at last. I cried.
Mackerel sky with blue – the best sunrise ever over Cape Horn, which was gentler, more like a mountain than I expected and much less desolate.
We were only two or three miles away. We saw it clearly.
The guys have been like schoolkids on an outing – now they’ve found the sweet shop.
Gentle breeze – due aft (Westerly at last). The crew broke out the stun'sls, the fair weather sails, and thought of rigging them.
Scottish Graeme was in his shorts again, because he'd promised or bet someone he would go round Cape Horn in his britches.
“The Horn’s putting on a show,” said Joe the mud-doctor to my right. He was wearing his charity shop evening dress over boxer shorts. It was around dawn. He looked like a demented, very tired, penguin.
We were all slightly mad that morning. It was, for every single one of us, the culmination of a lifetime's hopes and aspirations.
To taste real adventure, to sail somewhere special, to fulfil ourselves, to find out what it all really meant, being alive, risking disappointment, making it at last.
It was our own very special spectacular. Even as I was writing, the sky started to cloud over. Later, the wind hit us hard - up to Force 11 - and, in the next twenty four hours, we sailed the most nautical miles in a day that Endeavour had ever achieved - 202 miles in 24 hours - hot shit!
Screaming along.
Before that, as we drifted past the legendary place in balmy sunshine, I sketched the outline of the Horn in my notebook – twice – and I never sketch anything, because I am so bad at it.
It was a geat day – with a drop of fizzy wine to celebrate and a very genuine party mood.
The Captain produced souvenir tee shirts for us all – a million pictures were snapped and swapped.
Jane, Kate and Tiff at Cape Horn
We formally passed the crucial longitude (67 degrees 16 minutes W) at 09 20 exactly but by 1030 or 1100 it was like New Year’s day or late on Christmas Day, “oh, that was fun, that was special, what do we do now?”
So we cleaned the Captain’s cabin and double reefed and set the main topsail and I tried for a noon shot with my sextant and wrote the final verses for my song.
Oh, what a day, what a scene!
Oh what a place to have been!
Cape Horn at Dawn - 16th. April, 2002
I cannot do justice to it. Nearly ten years later, thinking back on it, revising what I wrote, I cannot do justice to it. Almost nothing in my life has meant so much as seeing Cape Horn at close quarters and sailing slowly round it on that wonderful ship, with those very special people after all the delays, the expectations, the frustrations and the privations - there we were, on that morning, on that day, with the sun rising above the peninsula which is Cape Horn and filling the sky with beauty.
Magic.
I hope I remember it until the very moment when I die.
I think I probably will
I can not believe it. We are there at last. I cried.
Mackerel sky with blue – the best sunrise ever over Cape Horn, which was gentler, more like a mountain than I expected and much less desolate.
We were only two or three miles away. We saw it clearly.
The guys have been like schoolkids on an outing – now they’ve found the sweet shop.
Gentle breeze – due aft (Westerly at last). The crew broke out the stun'sls, the fair weather sails, and thought of rigging them.
Scottish Graeme was in his shorts again, because he'd promised or bet someone he would go round Cape Horn in his britches.
“The Horn’s putting on a show,” said Joe the mud-doctor to my right. He was wearing his charity shop evening dress over boxer shorts. It was around dawn. He looked like a demented, very tired, penguin.
We were all slightly mad that morning. It was, for every single one of us, the culmination of a lifetime's hopes and aspirations.
To taste real adventure, to sail somewhere special, to fulfil ourselves, to find out what it all really meant, being alive, risking disappointment, making it at last.
It was our own very special spectacular. Even as I was writing, the sky started to cloud over. Later, the wind hit us hard - up to Force 11 - and, in the next twenty four hours, we sailed the most nautical miles in a day that Endeavour had ever achieved - 202 miles in 24 hours - hot shit!
Screaming along.
Before that, as we drifted past the legendary place in balmy sunshine, I sketched the outline of the Horn in my notebook – twice – and I never sketch anything, because I am so bad at it.
It was a geat day – with a drop of fizzy wine to celebrate and a very genuine party mood.
The Captain produced souvenir tee shirts for us all – a million pictures were snapped and swapped.
Jane, Kate and Tiff at Cape Horn
We formally passed the crucial longitude (67 degrees 16 minutes W) at 09 20 exactly but by 1030 or 1100 it was like New Year’s day or late on Christmas Day, “oh, that was fun, that was special, what do we do now?”
So we cleaned the Captain’s cabin and double reefed and set the main topsail and I tried for a noon shot with my sextant and wrote the final verses for my song.
Oh, what a day, what a scene!
Oh what a place to have been!
Cape Horn at Dawn - 16th. April, 2002
I cannot do justice to it. Nearly ten years later, thinking back on it, revising what I wrote, I cannot do justice to it. Almost nothing in my life has meant so much as seeing Cape Horn at close quarters and sailing slowly round it on that wonderful ship, with those very special people after all the delays, the expectations, the frustrations and the privations - there we were, on that morning, on that day, with the sun rising above the peninsula which is Cape Horn and filling the sky with beauty.
Magic.
I hope I remember it until the very moment when I die.
I think I probably will
Summary - The End
CIRCLES OF UNCERTAINTY
(From the text of a lecture at the conference to celebrate the 25th. anniversary of the Raising of the Mary Rose, October 2007 )
I took part in the BBC tv series about Endeavour as one of the team of navigators, working and living under something close to eighteenth century conditions, and I then signed on as an ordinary crew member to help to sail Endeavour from Fremantle, in Australia, to Whitby, in Yorkshire, around Cape Horn from West to East pondering every day on the extraordinary skills of the old navigators and the extraordinary difficulty of what they did. I spent 166 days at sea on Endeavour in twelve months, so there was time for reflection, for study and for experimenting with some of the old-fashioned navigational techniques.
It is supposed to be easy, nowadays, to know both where you are at sea and what you are most likely to bump in to.
But, as the fate of H.M.S. Nottingham shows - she was a British destroyer that whacked Wolf Rock, near Australia, in 2002 - the sea is still a very dangerous place.
In the eighteenth century, especially in the early years of that century, you never knew exactly where you were and you had very little chance of working out what you would bump in to from the primitive charts and navigational handbooks that were available. Explorers before Cook sailed round the world relying on the three Ls - 'lead, lookout and latitude' to keep their ships safe.
"Lead' - you swing the lead, dropping a lump of lead on a piece of string over the side of the ship, to find the depth. If the water is getting shallow very quickly, you try to go somewhere else immediately (if the wind happens to be in the right direction). But if you are approaching Boston (see Dana's great book, 'Two Years before the Mast',) you can navigate yourself into port in a fog by the samples of the sea-bottom that the tallow in a recess of the lead weight picks up and brings to the surface.
'Lookout' - while you are out at sea, you are safe (except from the elements) - it is the proximity of land which is frightening and brings you into the most extreme danger - so (if you are an old-time navigator) you post good lookouts all the time - especially when the water starts to get shallow. The lookouts can spot the tell-tale patch of cloud on the horizon that indicates a Pacific island, they can (if you are lucky) tell you when the colour of the water changes, which shows that you are getting closer to land; also, they can observe the type of birds that are seen, note the re-appearance of flies on board, maybe they notice a flying cockroach or catch a glimpse of a butterfly - there are lots of indicators that land is near that a good lookout can detect.
'Latitude' - from Phoenician times and certainly from medieval times, people knew that the Pole Star ('our star' as it is described in Dante's Inferno, written in 1320) was a good means of navigation.
It tells you where North is, in approximate terms, but also, if you measure or estimate its angle, it tells you how far up or down the globe you are, that is to say it establishes your latitude. People have relied on it as a basic indicator of geographical position for a very very long time. The sun at noon fulfils the same function, if you know how to use it, what allowances to make, which season (and which hemisphere) you are in.
Measuring angles is important for old-style navigation. It is the angle of the sun or of a star, in relation to the horizon or in relation to another heavenly body, which enables you to hypothesize where you might be, to make a well-informed guess about your vessel's whereabouts.
Whenever I get my sextant out on land, probably to check it, someone will always come up and make the jocular comment: "Where are we then? Know where we are?"
I try to be polite, but it always enrages me.
Sextants never tell you where you are. They are not like GPS at all - I love my sextant dearly but it is essentially a jumped up protractor just like the plastic gadgets children use at school but fabricated very accurately in metal and fitted with optics and micrometers and heavy filters to allow you to look directly at the sun - Sextants Measure Angles. That is all that they do.
What you do with the angles (afterwards) is up to you. You can use nineteenth century techniques (Sumner's position line/Marq St. Hilaire) which ought to allow you to calculate your position to within 2-5 miles from your true position or you can use the eighteenth century lunar distance methods that Captain Cook knew and Nevil Maskelyne (demonised as Harrison the Chronometer's worst enemy in Dava Sobel's book, 'Longitude') pioneered. This will give you your longitude "within a degree or a little more" as Maskelyne ventured in his introduction to "The British Mariner's Guide' published in 1763.
It will also take you hours and hours of patient calculation.
A degree is 60 miles at the equator. Maskelyne's method could, in his own estimate, produce a 'circle of uncertainty' around 75 miles wide, a vast improvement on the status before Maskelyne got to work, when the 'circle of uncertainty' could be hundreds of miles in diameter.
On the BBC voyage, my colleagues and I seem to have done rather better than Maskelyne predicted. Comparing the GPS positions of the ship with our estimates of its position after the journey showed that we were generally accurate to rather less than a degree. However, we had clear skies and very calm conditions.
On my second voyage on Endeavour, on the way across the Pacific, from Bluff, in New Zealand, to Cape Horn, Endeavour didn't see the sun or any star at all for 18 of the 39 days before we reached Cape Horn. We were also driven North (hove to) for a day and a half by a big storm. If I had been navigating by sextant and dead reckoning alone, I would have been a very worried man because it was impossible to tell, within a hundred or more miles, even what latitude we were on.
What have I learned? I have spent almost 12 months studying and working with eighteenth century ships and eighteeenth century navigational techniques. What have I proved or learned or established?
James Cook deserves his fame and his glory. His journeys are like the sculptures of Michelangelo - inimitable, unique, masterly, beautiful. When his men died from malaria, on the first voyage, he wrote about each of them as a friend; when his ship was in danger on the Barrier Reef, he records it in his journal with huge sang-froid and a professionalism which freezes my blood. He brought his ships and people home - not just on the first journey but then again on the second. His untimely death, on the third journey, was a sad and unnecessary tragedy - he was trying to prevent an escalation of a violent clash between the natives of Hawaii and his heavily armed supporters. But his men and his ships got home, even without him.
When Cook was 25 years old, his employer in Whitby (a Mr. Walker) offered him the opportunity to be the skipper of one of the colliers trading from Whitby to Newcastle and then to London. It was, I think, a good professional opportunity. Cook would have been secure and prosperous for life and he had started as a farm labourer's son with an apparent future just as a labourer or a shop-keeper.
Cook declined and joined the British Navy as an able seaman. He wanted to learn more about the world and he did. He taught himself surveying, navigation, seamanship, man-management. He saw himself as more than just a collier's skipper, more than just an ordinary person. He felt he had an important future in the wider world and he turned out to be right.
He was a great, great man and having, hesitantly and nervously, followed in some of his footsteps, I am more impressed than ever by his expertise, his energy and his capacity to endure.
The ship (the Endeavour replica) represents some of that and communicates some of it to you when you go on board.
Have a look at her, if you ever can - it is a wonderful experience. People like me, who have sailed on board, fall in love with Endeavour entirely and return repeatedly to find out more about her and about Captain James Cook.
It could be your turn next, to climb a mast or two, in gusty winds.
You won't ever forget the experience, if you do.
Captain Cook's return home is worth recalling in detail, in his own words.
Wednesday, 10th (July, 1771). Pleasant breezes and Clear weather. At 6 o’Clock in the Morning sounded, and Struck ground in 60 fathoms Shells and Stones, by which I judged we were the length of Scilly Isles. At Noon we saw land from the Mast Head, bearing North, which we judged to be about the Land’s End. Soundings 54 fathoms, Coarse, Grey Sand. Wind Westerly; course North 44 degrees East; distance 97 miles; latitude 49 degrees 29 minutes North, longitude 6 degrees 18 minutes West.
Twenty four hours later, they encountered "a fresh Gale, with which we run briskly up Channel."
Briskly indeed - I estimated his speed by his account of the landmarks on shore and it seems that Captain James Cook and his crew, the veterans of one of the great voyages, who should have been exhausted, debilitated, ravaged with scurvy, whose ship should have been falling apart and riddled with worm, covered the last 175 nautical miles in a magnificent 21. 5 hours - a speed of more than 8 knots. They probably had a big tide with them for more than half the time but it must still have been great sailing. Both foremast and main courses? The foremast topsail? Which of the spritsails? He doesn't say. Two strong men on the wheel - the ship flying home as if she wanted to, the deck bucking underfoot, everyone inwardly terrified and tearful and trembling with anticipation at the thought of stepping again, alive, having survived that epic adventure onto the soil of their homeland.
I think I now know something of how they might have felt.
THE END
(From the text of a lecture at the conference to celebrate the 25th. anniversary of the Raising of the Mary Rose, October 2007 )
I took part in the BBC tv series about Endeavour as one of the team of navigators, working and living under something close to eighteenth century conditions, and I then signed on as an ordinary crew member to help to sail Endeavour from Fremantle, in Australia, to Whitby, in Yorkshire, around Cape Horn from West to East pondering every day on the extraordinary skills of the old navigators and the extraordinary difficulty of what they did. I spent 166 days at sea on Endeavour in twelve months, so there was time for reflection, for study and for experimenting with some of the old-fashioned navigational techniques.
It is supposed to be easy, nowadays, to know both where you are at sea and what you are most likely to bump in to.
But, as the fate of H.M.S. Nottingham shows - she was a British destroyer that whacked Wolf Rock, near Australia, in 2002 - the sea is still a very dangerous place.
In the eighteenth century, especially in the early years of that century, you never knew exactly where you were and you had very little chance of working out what you would bump in to from the primitive charts and navigational handbooks that were available. Explorers before Cook sailed round the world relying on the three Ls - 'lead, lookout and latitude' to keep their ships safe.
"Lead' - you swing the lead, dropping a lump of lead on a piece of string over the side of the ship, to find the depth. If the water is getting shallow very quickly, you try to go somewhere else immediately (if the wind happens to be in the right direction). But if you are approaching Boston (see Dana's great book, 'Two Years before the Mast',) you can navigate yourself into port in a fog by the samples of the sea-bottom that the tallow in a recess of the lead weight picks up and brings to the surface.
'Lookout' - while you are out at sea, you are safe (except from the elements) - it is the proximity of land which is frightening and brings you into the most extreme danger - so (if you are an old-time navigator) you post good lookouts all the time - especially when the water starts to get shallow. The lookouts can spot the tell-tale patch of cloud on the horizon that indicates a Pacific island, they can (if you are lucky) tell you when the colour of the water changes, which shows that you are getting closer to land; also, they can observe the type of birds that are seen, note the re-appearance of flies on board, maybe they notice a flying cockroach or catch a glimpse of a butterfly - there are lots of indicators that land is near that a good lookout can detect.
'Latitude' - from Phoenician times and certainly from medieval times, people knew that the Pole Star ('our star' as it is described in Dante's Inferno, written in 1320) was a good means of navigation.
It tells you where North is, in approximate terms, but also, if you measure or estimate its angle, it tells you how far up or down the globe you are, that is to say it establishes your latitude. People have relied on it as a basic indicator of geographical position for a very very long time. The sun at noon fulfils the same function, if you know how to use it, what allowances to make, which season (and which hemisphere) you are in.
Measuring angles is important for old-style navigation. It is the angle of the sun or of a star, in relation to the horizon or in relation to another heavenly body, which enables you to hypothesize where you might be, to make a well-informed guess about your vessel's whereabouts.
Whenever I get my sextant out on land, probably to check it, someone will always come up and make the jocular comment: "Where are we then? Know where we are?"
I try to be polite, but it always enrages me.
Sextants never tell you where you are. They are not like GPS at all - I love my sextant dearly but it is essentially a jumped up protractor just like the plastic gadgets children use at school but fabricated very accurately in metal and fitted with optics and micrometers and heavy filters to allow you to look directly at the sun - Sextants Measure Angles. That is all that they do.
What you do with the angles (afterwards) is up to you. You can use nineteenth century techniques (Sumner's position line/Marq St. Hilaire) which ought to allow you to calculate your position to within 2-5 miles from your true position or you can use the eighteenth century lunar distance methods that Captain Cook knew and Nevil Maskelyne (demonised as Harrison the Chronometer's worst enemy in Dava Sobel's book, 'Longitude') pioneered. This will give you your longitude "within a degree or a little more" as Maskelyne ventured in his introduction to "The British Mariner's Guide' published in 1763.
It will also take you hours and hours of patient calculation.
A degree is 60 miles at the equator. Maskelyne's method could, in his own estimate, produce a 'circle of uncertainty' around 75 miles wide, a vast improvement on the status before Maskelyne got to work, when the 'circle of uncertainty' could be hundreds of miles in diameter.
On the BBC voyage, my colleagues and I seem to have done rather better than Maskelyne predicted. Comparing the GPS positions of the ship with our estimates of its position after the journey showed that we were generally accurate to rather less than a degree. However, we had clear skies and very calm conditions.
On my second voyage on Endeavour, on the way across the Pacific, from Bluff, in New Zealand, to Cape Horn, Endeavour didn't see the sun or any star at all for 18 of the 39 days before we reached Cape Horn. We were also driven North (hove to) for a day and a half by a big storm. If I had been navigating by sextant and dead reckoning alone, I would have been a very worried man because it was impossible to tell, within a hundred or more miles, even what latitude we were on.
What have I learned? I have spent almost 12 months studying and working with eighteenth century ships and eighteeenth century navigational techniques. What have I proved or learned or established?
James Cook deserves his fame and his glory. His journeys are like the sculptures of Michelangelo - inimitable, unique, masterly, beautiful. When his men died from malaria, on the first voyage, he wrote about each of them as a friend; when his ship was in danger on the Barrier Reef, he records it in his journal with huge sang-froid and a professionalism which freezes my blood. He brought his ships and people home - not just on the first journey but then again on the second. His untimely death, on the third journey, was a sad and unnecessary tragedy - he was trying to prevent an escalation of a violent clash between the natives of Hawaii and his heavily armed supporters. But his men and his ships got home, even without him.
When Cook was 25 years old, his employer in Whitby (a Mr. Walker) offered him the opportunity to be the skipper of one of the colliers trading from Whitby to Newcastle and then to London. It was, I think, a good professional opportunity. Cook would have been secure and prosperous for life and he had started as a farm labourer's son with an apparent future just as a labourer or a shop-keeper.
Cook declined and joined the British Navy as an able seaman. He wanted to learn more about the world and he did. He taught himself surveying, navigation, seamanship, man-management. He saw himself as more than just a collier's skipper, more than just an ordinary person. He felt he had an important future in the wider world and he turned out to be right.
He was a great, great man and having, hesitantly and nervously, followed in some of his footsteps, I am more impressed than ever by his expertise, his energy and his capacity to endure.
The ship (the Endeavour replica) represents some of that and communicates some of it to you when you go on board.
Have a look at her, if you ever can - it is a wonderful experience. People like me, who have sailed on board, fall in love with Endeavour entirely and return repeatedly to find out more about her and about Captain James Cook.
It could be your turn next, to climb a mast or two, in gusty winds.
You won't ever forget the experience, if you do.
Captain Cook's return home is worth recalling in detail, in his own words.
Wednesday, 10th (July, 1771). Pleasant breezes and Clear weather. At 6 o’Clock in the Morning sounded, and Struck ground in 60 fathoms Shells and Stones, by which I judged we were the length of Scilly Isles. At Noon we saw land from the Mast Head, bearing North, which we judged to be about the Land’s End. Soundings 54 fathoms, Coarse, Grey Sand. Wind Westerly; course North 44 degrees East; distance 97 miles; latitude 49 degrees 29 minutes North, longitude 6 degrees 18 minutes West.
Twenty four hours later, they encountered "a fresh Gale, with which we run briskly up Channel."
Briskly indeed - I estimated his speed by his account of the landmarks on shore and it seems that Captain James Cook and his crew, the veterans of one of the great voyages, who should have been exhausted, debilitated, ravaged with scurvy, whose ship should have been falling apart and riddled with worm, covered the last 175 nautical miles in a magnificent 21. 5 hours - a speed of more than 8 knots. They probably had a big tide with them for more than half the time but it must still have been great sailing. Both foremast and main courses? The foremast topsail? Which of the spritsails? He doesn't say. Two strong men on the wheel - the ship flying home as if she wanted to, the deck bucking underfoot, everyone inwardly terrified and tearful and trembling with anticipation at the thought of stepping again, alive, having survived that epic adventure onto the soil of their homeland.
I think I now know something of how they might have felt.
THE END
Afterword - Harrison and Dava Sobel
Unfair! Unfair!
material for a debate
Dava Sobel's hugely successful book, "Longitude", was wonderful in that it introduced the history of the Longitude problem to a wide audience. It was not, however, very fair to Nevil Maskelyne and to the lunar distance method of navigation which he pioneered.
Put yourself in Maskelyne's position, in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Clocks at that time meant pendulum clocks - completely unviable at sea. The possibility that a chronometer (spring-powered, with a double escapement mechanism,) could function accurately at differing temperatures when bucketing around in an ocean-going ship was virtually inconceivable. No sensible person would have suggested it.
Harrison was not, in those terms, sensible. He made a good clock out of lignum vitae wood. He was a carpenter (and a genius).
Of course Nevil Maskelyne assumed Harrison was mistaken.
Captain Cook did not. Within ten years of the chronometer's first proving voyages, he was using a copy in anger, relying on it, testing it, adopting that very pragmatism which (I believe) was utterly characteristic of men who went all over the world in wooden vessels held together and powered by string.
But how did he check his chronometer?
By calculating lunar distance measurements, of course. For more than a century, from Cook's time until 1906, it was axiomatic that a diligent navigator would use lunar distance methods as well as the chronometers to verify a vessel's longitude. The moon was reliable. Its mechanism would not break or run down (unlike a chronometer's or a battery-powered GPS).
Maskelyne, an astronomer who had proved his method at sea, knew all that. He relied on that. He put generations of seamen in a position to capitalise on that by calculating lunar distance data and publishing it in the Nautical Almanac.
Sobel's book makes Maskelyne into a villain and I doubt that he was. His 'Mariner's Guide' is still a very good, clear read. His constancy, in publishing lunar distance data each year, from 1768 until his death, is remarkable. No computers in those days - no calculators, not even mechanical adding machines to help. Just pencils and lots and lots of paper. What a triumph! What an achievment!
The Longitude Board messed about with Harrison in unforgivable ways, as Dava Sobel has recorded. He didn't get all the money he deserved for ages - in fact, it took a petition from the King and an Act of Parliament to achieve recognition for him and for his son, who took over his work.
Harrison eventually got more than £22,000 (several million in today's currency), from Parliament and the Longitude Board at the behest of the King himself.
Nevil Maskelyne became the Astronomer Royal but the Longitude Commissioners never awarded him a penny, despite the fact that his solution to the longitude question was viable and reliable and became the foundation stone of British naval power in the nineteenth century.
Harrison's chronometers (or the authorised copies of them which became the standard items carried on board British naval ships) were useless on very long voyages unless you could check them regularly with reference to lunar distance observations and calculations. This was before Mr. Marconi had discovered how to broadcast time signals from Greenwich around the world. This was before the ceremony of the 'noon gun' in Jersey, Hong Kong and Cape Town (and almost everywhere else where British ships called for trade, adventure and to protect British dominions and the Empire), a ceremony which allowed visiting ships to regulate their time pieces accurately before they moved on.
A chronometer, unless wound regularly and treated very, very carefully, would fail within a few days. A single chronometer, if you trusted it wholeheartedly over a period of weeks and months, could develop a major error and lead you seriously astray.
By the late nineteenth century, chronometers were cheap enough for a serious ocean going vessel to boast at least three and Claud Worth, a celebrated fore-runner of current cruising yachtsmen, relates in his book "Yacht Cruising" how a notice reading "have you wound up the chronometers?" was placed on the breakfast table each morning on his yacht in the early twentieth century.
Breakfast would not be served unless the chronometers had been properly tended.
None of the clock-copies based on Harrison's chronometers would have survived the extended duration of Cook's voyages without being checked and rated by comparison with lunar distance observations, probably once or twice per month or towards the point of expected landfall.
Only by reference to lunar distance navigation and to Maskelyne's blue-print for it, was it possible to keep chronometers working effectively. And lunars (rather than chronometers) were the most crucial aid to navigation even when Dana wrote, in the 1830s.
As Dana's ship approached Cape Horn, it was important to speak with another vessel, to learn where the ice was and to check longitude: “for we had no chronometer and had been drifting about so long that we had almost lost our reckoning; and opportunities for lunar observations are not frequent or sure in a place like Cape Horn.”'
Patrick O'Brian was, as everyone now knows, a fabulous chronicler of life at sea during the Napoleonic wars and accurately tells of the exploits of British sailors when they tried to confront the elements, the enemy and the technologies of the time.
In his 'Blue at the Mizzen' (around page 148) two ships meet at sea and their Masters consult and quarrel about the longitude. One of them has lost the use of his chronometer. The phrase ‘triangle of uncertainty’ is used.
"There would be no problem," he says, "if I could only get a decent lunar."
But the skies have been cloudy. It was not the right time of the month.
(This incident is so very like one in Dana's ‘Two Years before the Mast’ that I wondered if O’Brian had cribbed it, as he copied and honourably re-invented many incidents from accounts in the Naval Gazette, of which he was a constant student.)
From Dana's book, again, around page 276:
“We had evidently made great progress and had good hope of being soon up with the Cape, if we were not there already. We could put but little confidence in our reckoning, as there had been no opportunities for an observation, and we had drifted too much to allow of our dead reckoning being anywhere near the mark. If it would clear off enough to give a chance for an observation, or if we could make land, we should know where we were; and upon these, and the chances of falling in with a sail from the eastward, we depended almost entirely.”
What a world! What a way to live and sail, chancing everything on finding another vessel in the wastes of the Southern Ocean, risking a landfall on a barren, rocky coast, without any clear way of establishing - even within 100 miles - where you might be.
They were brave men, those sailors. No hot showers for them. No lavatories below the waterline. No breathable waterproof clothing or thermal underwear. Wickedly bad food, unyielding danger, the necessary disciplines of a ship at sea, the constant uncertainties about position, direction, landfall and survival.
Francis Chichester was a great and renowned airman before he became a renowned sailor and he taught and studied navigation for many years.
In his autobiography, The Lonely Sea And The Sky, he writes: (p. 297) “ if one could rely on accurate information, navigation would be a simple science, whereas the art and great fascination of it lies in deducing correctly from uncertain clues.”
In spite of Chichester’s amazing knowledge of navigation, with the widest possible experience of teaching it, writing textbooks about it and using it as a flyer and as a seaman, in spite of his access or potential access to the most up-to-date Ocean pilots, pilot charts and other reference sources, he is continually taken aback by ocean currents and eddies which upset his Dead Reckoning. There are examples of his difficulties on pages 291 and 295 of his book and there are other, similar complaints elsewhere. We are talking of 50 and more miles of error in a single day when Dead Reckoning has been carefully worked up by an acknowledged expert who spends up to two hours a day on his navigation (page 328).
This is very significant.
Chichester (p. 304) claims almost phenomenal expertise (in particular, he says he can estimate the speed of his vessel to one quarter of a knot).
If Chichester could not get Dead Reckoning right all the time, then no one could or can.
Thank heaven for the Global Positioning System and its eventual successors. Long may they help to protect us from our own inefficiency on the oceans.
But it is worth sounding a loud cautionary note.
In May, 2,000, GPS SA (Selective Availability) was removed and GPS became suddenly much more accurate.
How kind of the American Government, which controls this system completely and unilaterally, to cease to degrade the signals and the system.
How very (apparently) warm-hearted!
from the Journal Of Navigation, Sept. 2001, p. 439
Selective Availability was removed because the “capacity to deny GPS signals on a regional basis was achieved at the beginning of 2000.”
In other words, the Americans can switch GPS on or off, at any time, in any region of the world if they so choose.
Keep your sextants handy and practice Dead Reckoning whenever you can.
I certainly intend to.
You may need those skills badly one day.
material for a debate
Dava Sobel's hugely successful book, "Longitude", was wonderful in that it introduced the history of the Longitude problem to a wide audience. It was not, however, very fair to Nevil Maskelyne and to the lunar distance method of navigation which he pioneered.
Put yourself in Maskelyne's position, in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Clocks at that time meant pendulum clocks - completely unviable at sea. The possibility that a chronometer (spring-powered, with a double escapement mechanism,) could function accurately at differing temperatures when bucketing around in an ocean-going ship was virtually inconceivable. No sensible person would have suggested it.
Harrison was not, in those terms, sensible. He made a good clock out of lignum vitae wood. He was a carpenter (and a genius).
Of course Nevil Maskelyne assumed Harrison was mistaken.
Captain Cook did not. Within ten years of the chronometer's first proving voyages, he was using a copy in anger, relying on it, testing it, adopting that very pragmatism which (I believe) was utterly characteristic of men who went all over the world in wooden vessels held together and powered by string.
But how did he check his chronometer?
By calculating lunar distance measurements, of course. For more than a century, from Cook's time until 1906, it was axiomatic that a diligent navigator would use lunar distance methods as well as the chronometers to verify a vessel's longitude. The moon was reliable. Its mechanism would not break or run down (unlike a chronometer's or a battery-powered GPS).
Maskelyne, an astronomer who had proved his method at sea, knew all that. He relied on that. He put generations of seamen in a position to capitalise on that by calculating lunar distance data and publishing it in the Nautical Almanac.
Sobel's book makes Maskelyne into a villain and I doubt that he was. His 'Mariner's Guide' is still a very good, clear read. His constancy, in publishing lunar distance data each year, from 1768 until his death, is remarkable. No computers in those days - no calculators, not even mechanical adding machines to help. Just pencils and lots and lots of paper. What a triumph! What an achievment!
The Longitude Board messed about with Harrison in unforgivable ways, as Dava Sobel has recorded. He didn't get all the money he deserved for ages - in fact, it took a petition from the King and an Act of Parliament to achieve recognition for him and for his son, who took over his work.
Harrison eventually got more than £22,000 (several million in today's currency), from Parliament and the Longitude Board at the behest of the King himself.
Nevil Maskelyne became the Astronomer Royal but the Longitude Commissioners never awarded him a penny, despite the fact that his solution to the longitude question was viable and reliable and became the foundation stone of British naval power in the nineteenth century.
Harrison's chronometers (or the authorised copies of them which became the standard items carried on board British naval ships) were useless on very long voyages unless you could check them regularly with reference to lunar distance observations and calculations. This was before Mr. Marconi had discovered how to broadcast time signals from Greenwich around the world. This was before the ceremony of the 'noon gun' in Jersey, Hong Kong and Cape Town (and almost everywhere else where British ships called for trade, adventure and to protect British dominions and the Empire), a ceremony which allowed visiting ships to regulate their time pieces accurately before they moved on.
A chronometer, unless wound regularly and treated very, very carefully, would fail within a few days. A single chronometer, if you trusted it wholeheartedly over a period of weeks and months, could develop a major error and lead you seriously astray.
By the late nineteenth century, chronometers were cheap enough for a serious ocean going vessel to boast at least three and Claud Worth, a celebrated fore-runner of current cruising yachtsmen, relates in his book "Yacht Cruising" how a notice reading "have you wound up the chronometers?" was placed on the breakfast table each morning on his yacht in the early twentieth century.
Breakfast would not be served unless the chronometers had been properly tended.
None of the clock-copies based on Harrison's chronometers would have survived the extended duration of Cook's voyages without being checked and rated by comparison with lunar distance observations, probably once or twice per month or towards the point of expected landfall.
Only by reference to lunar distance navigation and to Maskelyne's blue-print for it, was it possible to keep chronometers working effectively. And lunars (rather than chronometers) were the most crucial aid to navigation even when Dana wrote, in the 1830s.
As Dana's ship approached Cape Horn, it was important to speak with another vessel, to learn where the ice was and to check longitude: “for we had no chronometer and had been drifting about so long that we had almost lost our reckoning; and opportunities for lunar observations are not frequent or sure in a place like Cape Horn.”'
Patrick O'Brian was, as everyone now knows, a fabulous chronicler of life at sea during the Napoleonic wars and accurately tells of the exploits of British sailors when they tried to confront the elements, the enemy and the technologies of the time.
In his 'Blue at the Mizzen' (around page 148) two ships meet at sea and their Masters consult and quarrel about the longitude. One of them has lost the use of his chronometer. The phrase ‘triangle of uncertainty’ is used.
"There would be no problem," he says, "if I could only get a decent lunar."
But the skies have been cloudy. It was not the right time of the month.
(This incident is so very like one in Dana's ‘Two Years before the Mast’ that I wondered if O’Brian had cribbed it, as he copied and honourably re-invented many incidents from accounts in the Naval Gazette, of which he was a constant student.)
From Dana's book, again, around page 276:
“We had evidently made great progress and had good hope of being soon up with the Cape, if we were not there already. We could put but little confidence in our reckoning, as there had been no opportunities for an observation, and we had drifted too much to allow of our dead reckoning being anywhere near the mark. If it would clear off enough to give a chance for an observation, or if we could make land, we should know where we were; and upon these, and the chances of falling in with a sail from the eastward, we depended almost entirely.”
What a world! What a way to live and sail, chancing everything on finding another vessel in the wastes of the Southern Ocean, risking a landfall on a barren, rocky coast, without any clear way of establishing - even within 100 miles - where you might be.
They were brave men, those sailors. No hot showers for them. No lavatories below the waterline. No breathable waterproof clothing or thermal underwear. Wickedly bad food, unyielding danger, the necessary disciplines of a ship at sea, the constant uncertainties about position, direction, landfall and survival.
Francis Chichester was a great and renowned airman before he became a renowned sailor and he taught and studied navigation for many years.
In his autobiography, The Lonely Sea And The Sky, he writes: (p. 297) “ if one could rely on accurate information, navigation would be a simple science, whereas the art and great fascination of it lies in deducing correctly from uncertain clues.”
In spite of Chichester’s amazing knowledge of navigation, with the widest possible experience of teaching it, writing textbooks about it and using it as a flyer and as a seaman, in spite of his access or potential access to the most up-to-date Ocean pilots, pilot charts and other reference sources, he is continually taken aback by ocean currents and eddies which upset his Dead Reckoning. There are examples of his difficulties on pages 291 and 295 of his book and there are other, similar complaints elsewhere. We are talking of 50 and more miles of error in a single day when Dead Reckoning has been carefully worked up by an acknowledged expert who spends up to two hours a day on his navigation (page 328).
This is very significant.
Chichester (p. 304) claims almost phenomenal expertise (in particular, he says he can estimate the speed of his vessel to one quarter of a knot).
If Chichester could not get Dead Reckoning right all the time, then no one could or can.
Thank heaven for the Global Positioning System and its eventual successors. Long may they help to protect us from our own inefficiency on the oceans.
But it is worth sounding a loud cautionary note.
In May, 2,000, GPS SA (Selective Availability) was removed and GPS became suddenly much more accurate.
How kind of the American Government, which controls this system completely and unilaterally, to cease to degrade the signals and the system.
How very (apparently) warm-hearted!
from the Journal Of Navigation, Sept. 2001, p. 439
Selective Availability was removed because the “capacity to deny GPS signals on a regional basis was achieved at the beginning of 2000.”
In other words, the Americans can switch GPS on or off, at any time, in any region of the world if they so choose.
Keep your sextants handy and practice Dead Reckoning whenever you can.
I certainly intend to.
You may need those skills badly one day.
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