Eric Newby - What the Traveller Saw

Even the thought of losing the Gujarati account book filled me with apprehension, and then, one day, I did lose it. Waking up in what had been a church hall in Bihar in the middle of the night, plagued by rats, I realized that I had left it on the platform at a railway junction, miles away. Arriving there by cycle rickshaw in what was by then the early hours of the next morning, I found that there had been no cause for alarm. ‘Sir,’ said the ticket clerk, when he handed it over to me, ‘it is only a book of writing, of no value to anyone at all.’

The following year, in 1963, I went to work for the Observer as Travel Editor, and a large number of the pictures in this book were taken during that period, one of the happiest periods of my life, which lasted ten years. As a result, What the Traveller Saw essentially commemorates the past, and, in many cases, a world that has changed beyond all recognition.

THESE PHOTOGRAPHS form part of a large collection taken while I was serving in the four-masted Finnish barque Moshulu of Mariehamn in 1938/9, when she was engaged in the Australian grain trade.

As an apprentice in Moshulu I was bound by the Conditions for the Acceptance of Apprentices in Finnish Sailing Vessels. You had to be not less than sixteen years old and of strong constitution. Two doctors’ certificates were required, and one from a clergyman testifying that the applicant was of good moral character. My father had to pay the owner of the ship, Gustav Erikson, a premium of £50 for a year or a round voyage, whichever was the shorter. If I died, he was told, he would get a pro-rata repayment. The apprentice had to supply his own gear and was paid 150 Finmarks a month (about 10s. or 50p), but only at the end of the voyage, and less any deductions (I dropped a hammer overboard in Belfast before we sailed, and the cost was deducted from my pay). An able-bodied seaman got about 650 Finmarks, the sailmaker (because he was exceptionally experienced) about 1400 Finmarks, the steward about 2000, the mates from 1200 to 3000, and the captain about 4000 Finmarks (£20) a month. Not much for such a lonely position of responsibility. He was in his thirties. The oldest member of the crew was the sailmaker, who was nearly sixty.

Being an apprentice, I took nearly all the photographs during my free watch; many of them when I was done-in after long hours on deck, at the wheel, or up in the rigging. If I wanted to record the other watch working in rough weather, it required an effort of will not to fall asleep as soon as I went below, but to turn out again with my camera. Similarly uninviting was the prospect of keeping my daily log of the voyage up to date, which I did for some eight months, without missing a day.

What induced budding sailors to sail in Erikson ships in the 1930s, apart from a few inquisitive English speakers such as myself? The Finns were obliged to because they had to spend three years in square sail before going to navigation school in order to sit for a second mate’s ticket in their merchant marine. Numbers of Germans had to do the same in order to get in the time required by their government, until Hitler came to power when they had to serve their time in German ships. A great blow to the Germans was the loss of the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s Admiral Karpfanger , a four-masted barque sold to them by Erikson, which went missing in the Southern Ocean on her way to the Horn from South Australia with the loss of all 68 hands, including 40 cadets, in 1938 – the same year I joined the Moshulu. Norway, Sweden and Denmark had similar arrangements for their sailors, some of whom sailed in Finnish ships.

By the 1930s the grain trade from South Australia to Europe was the last enterprise in which the remaining square-riggers (by 1938 there was still only one ship equipped with an auxiliary engine) could engage with any real hope of profit, and then only if the owner exercised the strictest economy and at the same time maintained the utmost efficiency.

The only contender for such a role by the time I joined his fleet was Gustav Erikson from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands in the Baltic, off the coast of Sweden, the owner of ten ocean-going square-rigged sailing ships. He employed no PROs to improve his image. One of the things that warmed me to him was that he was completely indifferent as to whether anyone liked him or not. It would have been as reasonable to expect anyone to ‘like’ the Prime Minister or the Inspector of Taxes as to like ‘Ploddy Gustav’, as he was known. He was only interested in his crews in so far as they were necessary to sail his ships efficiently (the majority who sailed in them had to whether they wanted to or not), and for that reason he ensured that crews were adequately and decently fed by sailing-ship standards (which meant that we were permanently ravenous and dreamt of nothing but food), and that the ships, which were rated 100 A1 at Lloyd’s but not insured (only the cargoes were insured), were supplied with enough rope, canvas, paint and other necessary materials to enable them to be thoroughly seaworthy.

He certainly knew about sailing ships. At the age of nine he was shipped aboard a vessel engaged in the North Sea trade. At nineteen he got his first command, and from 1902 to 1913, after having spent the six previous years in deep-water sail as a mate, he was master of a number of square-rigged vessels before becoming an owner.

Ships engaged in the grain trade would normally sail from Europe at the end of September or early in October in ballast, pick up the trade winds in the North and South Atlantic and, when south of Tristan da Cunha – more or less half way between South America and Africa – run before the westerlies in 40°S or higher latitudes, according to the time of year, across the southern Indian Ocean. The first landfall of the entire 15,000-nautical-mile voyage might well be the lighthouse on the South Neptune Islands at the entrance to the shark-infested Spencer Gulf in the Great Australian Bight, where the wheat was brought down to the little ports on its shores for loading. A good passage outward bound in ballast was around 80 days – we were 82 days in 1939 but Pommern was only 78.

It could be weeks or months before a freight was fixed. No pay was issued by the captain for fear that we might run away. As soon as freight was arranged, the ship would sail to the loading port; but first, miles offshore, the crew had to get rid of the ballast, shovelling it into baskets in the hold where the temperature was up in the hundreds fahrenheit, hoisting them out and emptying them over the side. It was not possible to jettison all the ballast at once, so one or more trips had to be made to the ballast grounds in the intervals of loading the cargo, which was frequently interrupted by the strong winds that blew in the Gulf. Except in one or two places where there were jetties, the ships had to lie offshore and load the sacks of grain into their holds from lightering ketches. A 3000-ton barque such as Moshulu could carry 59,000 sacks of grain, 4875 tons of it, which was what we loaded in 1939.

Even after waiting sometimes months for a freight, and then loading, which could take another six weeks, Erikson could still make a profit after a round voyage of 30,000 sea miles, 15,000 of them in ballast, even if it took some of his smaller barques 120 days or more to make the homeward voyage. The charterers were not worried; providing it was kept dry, grain was not a perishable cargo, and whoever happened to own it at any particular time on the voyage, for it often changed hands several times in the course of it, was getting free warehousing for his cargo.

The normal time of departure for Europe was between the last week in February and the end of March. A good passage home was 100 days, anything less was very good.