Maritime
Paul Ableman
A Book of Sea Journeys ed. Ludovic Ken' nedy (Collins pp. 395, £7.95)
n 1573, Eugenio de Salazar, a Spanish I colonial administrator who peaked a; Governor of Teneriffe,embarked in a vessel called the Nuestra Senora de los Remedios to take up a judicial appointment on the island of Hispaniola. He recalls: '1300 Catalina and I, with all our household .• • were given, as a great privilege, a tiny cabi5, about two feet by three by three ...'. This is a volume approximately two-thirds that of the desk upon which I am writing. It 15,; admittedly, a substantial desk but, 11
hollow, would scarcely provide accorn'
modation for a medium-sized dog. The reference to 'all our household' and the specification of the cabin's size are in dir ferent sentences and it may be that the ser vants were separately stowed. Still it re'
mains barely conceivable that the wretclie,",
ambassador and his wife and children coniu, have endured a month-long voyage packed into such a hole. Signor Salazar was a droll fellow and is clearly aiming, in his account, at wry humour but the horrors of the
voyage, such as the rats `so fierce that when
they are cornered they turn on the limiters like wild boars', the constipation-inducing
sanitary arrangements ('you have to hong out over the sea like a cat-burglar clingin( to a wall') and the unattractive manners
fellow passengers who 'belch, or vomit, or break wind, or empty their bowels, while you are having your breakfast', in addition to the narrowness of his quarters, ultimate' ly crushed his spirits. He exploded into a passionate eulogy about the delights of land journey as compared to his hellish ordeal at sea. Signor Salazar referred to his bobbing wooden hull as 'a city'. About 300 Years later, real cities began to cross the Atlantic' In the great liners, with their shopping Cell. tres, ballrooms, palatial suites and swim" ming pools, a passenger might indeed, in calm weather at least, forget the fury of the sea. And then, one calm day in 1912, tile, `unsinkable' Titanic rubbed lightly against an iceberg and the whole, collossal Music° of terrestrial opulence was soon on its wart to the bottom. And today the sea can humble over-confidence. During this Pas Christmas, its power dampened our spirits when it reduced the Penless lifeboat to fragments and claimed 16 lives. Mr Kennedy served in destroyers in the last war. He knows his brine and has given us a thoroughly entertaining nauttcalc miscellany. Still, I doubt if his superior 01 ficers would have credited him with running a ship-shape book. There is an air of inn' provisation about its structure and allegcy aims. There is no doubt that sea literature is, in Mr Kennedy's own words, 'almost as vast as the sea itself but the very abun- dance calls for precise planning and orderly disposition. The title clearly specifies 'sea Journeys' as the leitmotif but many items, such as the notes on the slave trade, and the i°118 account of the Japanese surrender at Yokohama, do not come into this category. In his short Introduction, Mr Kennedy of- fers an alternative organising principle: `The factor common to all sections of the be is people ...'. Well, it is certainly true at people figure in almost every item but sn You would expect — and James , arrieron's brilliant and awe-inspiring ac- count of a hydrogen bomb test explosion at Bikini is not much concerned with either People or journeying but rather with in- timations of armageddon. , The quality of the riting varies greatly Ont it is striking thatw experienced sailors rather than experienced writers seem to have the greatest power to evoke the marine environment. The staple prose of most gents is seasoned with short poems, or ex- tracts from poems, and with a sprinkling of well-chosen black-and-white illustrations. A great deal of the boOk is, predictably, taken up with disaster of one kind or another at sea. Many of the souls in peril were afloat of their volition but this in no way mitigates the chilling nature of ac- counts like that of Ann Davison who, in 1948, watched impotently while her hus- band was battered to death by waves beside h" "er on a makeshift life-raft. Ann, reolarkably enough, survived to challenge the sea again in a solo voyage across the Atlantic. Life-boat voyages are at the heart °f Marine drama and none in this book is more harrowing than Quartermaster Angus Macdonald's spare report of rowing 54 peo- ple away from a torpedoed liner one day in 1942 and, 36 days later, climbing with only two other survivors (one of whom died a Jew days later) on board a rescue ship. Some of the most engaging items are by women. John Buchan's sister, Anna, pokes gentle fun at her companions making a Passage to India in 1913 and reveals an ac- enroplished prose style. But my favourite Piece is a long extract from the diary of A, Brassey who, in 1876-77, sailed round the world in her husband's yacht The Sunbeam. There were 43 people on board, Including 'four children, four guests a surgeon four stewards and a stewardess, two cooks, a nurse and a lady's
The voyage was a kind of sea-going Parody of proconsular life. 'In the after- 1oon n there is more reading, writing and
ons. . .until the dressing-bell gives warn- ta,g to prepare for dinner'. But, preserving always the bearing and standards of the memsahib, Anna Brassey coped effortlessly with emergencies varying from capturing a '
ship's Pig on deck to rescuing an entire ""'P's company from a burning schooner. .? Perhaps she deserves the last word: :ailors are more like children than gown- Men' and require as much looking after'.
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