Is a beautiful boat’s
appeal universal?
A
dmiring the craftsmanship
of a beautiful boat is one of my
favourite pastimes. Whether
it’s a Contessa 32 or a Corribee,
an America’s Cup Class 12 Metre
or an Albin Vega, a West Solent
One Design or a Westerly Centaur,
the love I have for these craft is
unconditional, and shared by all those who have a place
for sailing in their hearts.
The love of one’s vessel goes back years, although not
every vessel garners the same reaction from everyone.
My grandfather, Richard Stephens Durham, was an
apprentice in deepwater sail at
the turn of last century. He made
passages on a three-mast barque,
the Pass of Killiecrankie, carrying
coal from Wales to Chile and guano
back, sailing the wrong way around
Cape Horn. As an 85-year-old man,
he told my 15-year-old ears how
a fellow apprentice he was sharing the yardarm
with, fell, hitting the side of the ship before falling
into the sea – they were on the weather side.
‘I can still hear his boots going “bong, bong,
bong” down the side of the ship,’ he told me.
So it was interesting for me recently to come across
a book in a charity shop called Cape Horn Breed,
published in 1956 and written by a retired sailor named
William Jones, who had been engaged in the same trade
as a youngster that my grandfather had experienced.
Jones was aboard a full-rigged ship, the steel-hulled
British Isles, laden with Welsh coal, when in 1905,
and bound for the west coast of South America, they
had Cape Horn abeam 58 days out from Port Talbot.
However, westerly gales kept them tacking to and fro
between Antarctica and the Horn for a further 52 days.
In that time, they lost three seamen overboard and
another from head injuries after a sea swept him into
the scuppers. A fi fth had a gangrenous leg amputated
and eight were incapacitated by frostbite. And
yet, even after all that, this is what Jones wrote:
The big wind ships of the last days of sail were
glorious creations of the skill of man, beautifully
adapted in their era to the purpose for which they
were designed. When they became obsolete and
then extinct, something splendid vanished from
the world, to become only a memory and eventually
a legend, which seems, in a fully mechanised world,
almost incredible.
My own experience of the bewitching qualities
of beautiful craft came aboard the humble Thames
barge – not exactly a Jane Fonda among ships, but
winsome nevertheless. Cambria
was the last vessel to trade
under sail alone, and I was
mate in her for her fi nal
14 months in commission.
We weren’t popular in the
London Docks as the stevedores
had to rig out the ship’s derricks
to load us because, thanks to her rig, we couldn’t pass
beneath freighter’s mooring lines and lie between the
ship and the wharf, enabling the more effi cient dock
cranes to discharge the cargo.
‘What you come here to load, cannonballs?’ and
‘Where’s Nelson, down the cabin?’ were the sort of
remarks made by the cheesed-off Cockney dockers
when Cambria turned up instead of a motor barge.
But on one occasion, the brickbats turned to beatitudes.
Cambria was loading from a German ship, the
crew of which were watching the rigmarole of derrick
discharge from the bridge, when one said to the other:
‘If this is all England has, how come she won the war?’
At which, a docker dropped his freighthook, looked
up and replied: ‘If this is all we had then how come you
lost it?’
While working barges and tall ships carrying coal
might not appeal to all, beauty, it seems, is in the eye
of the bemoaner.Ships of the last
days of sail were
glorious creations
COLUMN
DICK
DURHAM