Mariners’ tales from the last days of sail

Anthology captures life on the old square riggers They may have been hell to sail in, but their beauty, viewed from a safe distance, cannot be denied

Michael Grey - Friday 4 July 2008

WHAT on earth was it like to serve at sea nearly 150 years ago? We may have replica craft and sail training ships, but neither,in our risk-averse society, could begin to replicate the sort of conditions endured by those who took big commercial sailing ships to sea during the last half of the 19th century.

Square Rigger Days is an anthology first published in 1938, of seafarers’ reminiscences from those times. They were collected and edited by Charles Domville-Fife, who himself had been a seafarer before becoming a marine author, and who had known these seafarers, perhaps after they had moved into the steamships which had eroded the business of the wind-driven ships throughout the latter part of the century.

In his introduction to the 1938 edition, Domville-Fife points out that some of the authors “have already reached the age of ninety years, and the white wings of memory will pass with them into the Valhalla of the Sea”.

They will now have all long gone, Domville-Fife dying in 1960, so their contributions are perhaps even more valuable, as direct recollections of working seafarers, and a way of life which had lasted for thousands of years, but which was about to end.

In its latest manifestation, this is a very beautiful book, with the 19 contributions interspersed by some very evocative photographs, often of the very ships themselves.

The oldest recollections in the collection are from Harry Hine, who sailed before the mast at the age of 15, became a sailing ship mate and then a distinguished artist.

He describes his first voyage, which began when he joined the little barque Flying Fish in January 1859 for a trip to South America. An experienced hand a year later he joined the East Indiaman Tudor, “teak built and bell bowed, with quarter galleries, stern windows and carried fourteen carronades on the main deck”.

There is even a photograph dated 1861, showing this by then hugely-dated ship lying in Calcutta.

Other reminiscences, invariably from the pens of master mariners recalling old voyages, are rather later, some from the dying days of the windships at the start of the 20th century, and common to these is the perception that the best quality seafarers had by then migrated into steam.

Indeed, in his scholarly introduction to this new edition, Professor Robert Foulke writes of the long, slow death of the sailing ship and the disappearance of the seasoned windship sailors.

He writes of the hazards of the undermanned ships scratching around for freights as the steamships erode their trade, and the contradictions of the “romance” of vanished sail with the reality of appalling conditions and a pretty dire workforce.

Some of the photographs in this book are indeed beautiful and show that these old photographers had little to learn, even though their equipment might have been primitive.

Across the title page ghosts, against towering clouds and through a long Pacific swell, the barque Kaiulani, the last commercial sailing ship to fly the Stars and Stripes.

They may have been hell to sail in, but their beauty, viewed from a safe distance, cannot be denied.

Square Rigger Days — Autobiographies of Sail, by Charles Domville-Fife, published in paperback by Seaforth Publishing (an imprint of Pen & Sword Books).

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