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.