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Fiction Sea Stories

The Way of a Ship

A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail

by (author) Derek Lundy

Publisher
Knopf Canada
Initial publish date
Aug 2003
Category
Sea Stories, Action & Adventure, Biographical
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780676973679
    Publish Date
    Aug 2003
    List Price
    $22.00

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Description

From the author of Godforsaken Sea -- a #1 bestseller in Canada and “one of the best books ever written about sailing” (Time magazine) -- comes a magnificent re-creation of a square-rigger voyage round Cape Horn at the end of the 19th century.

In The Way of a Ship, Derek Lundy places his seafaring great-great uncle, Benjamin Lundy, on board the Beara Head and brings to life the ship’s community as it performs the exhausting and dangerous work of sailing a square-rigger across the sea.

The “beautiful, widow-making, deep-sea” sailing ships could sail fast in almost all weather and carry substantial cargo. Handling square-riggers demanded detailed and specialized skills, and life at sea, although romanticized by sea-voyage chroniclers, was often brutal. Seamen were sleep deprived and malnourished, at times half-starved, and scurvy was still a possibility. Derek Lundy reminds readers what Melville and Conrad expressed so well: that the sea voyage is an overarching metaphor for life itself. As Benjamin Lundy nears the Horn and its attendant terrors, the traditional qualities of the sailor -- fatalism, stoicism, courage, obedience to a strict hierarchy, even sentimentality -- are revealed in their dying days, as sail gave way to steam.

Derek Lundy tells his gripping tale with the kind of storytelling skill and writerly breadth that is usually the ken of our finest novelists, and in so doing, imagines a harrowing and wholly credible history for his seafaring Irish-Canadian ancestor.

About the author

Contributor Notes

Derek Lundy is the bestselling author of Godforsaken Sea: Racing The World's Most Dangerous Waters, The Way of a Ship: A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail, and The Bloody Red Hand: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland. He lives and rides on Salt Spring Island, B.C.

Excerpt: The Way of a Ship: A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail (by (author) Derek Lundy)

Them was the days, sonnies,
Them was the men,
Them was the ships
As we’ll never see again.
C. Fox Smith, “What the Old Man Said”

Prologue
To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time,
a passing phase of life . . .
Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”
There never was a sailor’s tale that wasn’t a damn lie.
Kenneth Roberts, Captain Caution

Baltazar is anchored in a small bay on the east side of Isla Herschel, on the Paso al Mar del Sur, almost exactly seven miles north-northeast of Cape Horn. We’re recording a sustained wind of more than sixty knots at deck level and gusts of close to eighty -- although they’re as much as 30 per cent stronger at the masthead. The anchor is dug into the sand bottom, good holding, with two hundred feet of chain out and two nylon snubbing lines to absorb the shock of the waves.

Before the front crossed over, the wind was out of the northeast. We were almost wide open in that direction, out into the Bahia Arquistade and beyond it, to the great Southern Ocean itself. For twelve hours, we pitched into seas eight to ten feet high before the wind backed first to the northwest and then west, rising to near-hurricane strength as it clocked round. By then, the low, grassy hills astern and on our sides gave us the protection we had counted on.

Apart from the anchor, we have three lines out to shore, two secured to wind-carved dwarf trees one hundred feet off our stern and one running off our port side, shackled to a cable we have wrapped around a large rock. The lines are fouled with hundreds of pounds of cleaving kelp, broken away from its beds by the storm. The weight adds strain to the lines but also dampens down their surges as the wind slams into the hull and rigging of our fifty-foot steel boat.

Two of us dragged the lines ashore in the rubber dinghy, paddling in frantic haste like commandos storming a beach. Baltazar was difficult to control in the rising and gusty wind, and we had to get the stabilizing lines secured in a hurry. Our skipper, Bertrand, worked the engine to keep the boat off the close, encirling rocks. Twice, I scaled the low cliff behind the beach and tied off two lines. Such exertion was unusual for me in my sedentary life, and afterwards, I slumped on the rocks gasping, heart thumping much too fast. I wondered if it was my destiny to die on this stony shore.

Weatherfax maps limned the growth of the unfolding storm. Twenty-four hours earlier, it had been an unremarkable, loose-structured low-pressure system. We would keep an eye on it as we rounded the Horn, but we wouldn’t worry too much about it, maybe even using it to make a fast run across the Bahia Nassau and back to the Beagle Channel and shelter in this corner of inhospitable Tierra del Fuego. Then the barometer began to drop fast, going down at a sixty-degree angle until its line disappeared off the graph. The next weatherfax disclosed that the system had tightened up, its isobars bunching together until they almost merged, air pressure down to a frightening 950 millibars at the centre. The Chilean navy broadcast a securité, warning all vessels to get to shelter immediately. We began to see the cirrus and cirrocumulus clouds that signalled the depression -- the “mares’ tail and mackerel sky” that makes any sailor apprehensive. After clearing the eastern tip of Isla Hornos, we ran hard for a haven.

Bertrand is a fifteen-year veteran of these waters, and of many voyages across Drake Passage to Antarctica. He’s never seen a storm that looks like this one, he tells us. And when the worst of the wind hits us, it is the strongest he’s ever experienced. That’s when the barometer begins to rise again, its tracing line reappearing on the graph and shooting up almost vertically. I didn’t know a barometer could do that.

Fast rise after low foretells a stronger blow. With anxious fascination, we watch the wind lay our boat over on its side as if it was sailing close-hauled into a strong headwind.

The Horn has lived up to its reputation again. In twelve hours, its malign influences have transformed an innocuous summer low coming in out of the Southern Ocean into the most dangerous of storms: what the old square-rigger sailors used to call a Cape Horn snorter.

On deck for ten minutes to check shore lines for chafe and take photographs, dressed in my modern warm and impermeable foul-weather gear, I can, nevertheless, feel the windchill, fifteen or twenty, or more, below zero. The weight of wind is like a soft yet powerful, unyielding wall moulding itself to my body. It’s impossible to keep my eyes open looking to windward; raindrops are tiny, blinding missiles. I must concentrate on not getting flipped off the deck and into the sea. Later, from our snug, dry cabin, I look out at the horizontal rain and hail, the fog of sea water as the wind lashes the sea’s surface into the air.

I often think of the nineteenth-century square-rigger men during the two days we wait out the storm in our little bay of refuge. I say to Bertrand: “How could they have done it?”

It’s the question I’ve been asking myself since the storm began. It’s the question I have come to Cape Horn to try to answer.

Day after day, week after week, summer or winter, wind-ship sailors endured just the sort of battering wind and deluge we were comfortably observing. They went aloft a hundred feet or more on icy ratlines and footropes, up masts that could whip to and fro through ninety degrees of arc in a few seconds, to grapple with homicidal sails, certain death just one small mistake, a slip, away. In leaky oilskins, always soaked, no heat or light in their squalid fo’c’s’les, malnourished, scurvy -- the sailor’s ancient bane -- still a possibility even at the end of the nineteenth century.

One writer, a square-rigger sailor himself, coined the phrase “the Cape Horn breed” to describe the men who worked the beautiful, widow-making deep-sea sailing ships in their dying days. It felt apt to me. Those seamen’s work was fraught with so much danger, their plane of discomfort such true suffering, that the men who matter-of-factly did it seemed remote and alien, like shadowy warriors in old and vanished wars.

I had a personal interest in these sailors. Some of my ancestors had been Cape Horn seamen. One of them was my great-great-uncle Benjamin Lundy, at sea in the 1880s. I had some of his letters and I knew what he looked like; I had met his descendants and become friends with them. I wanted to write about his voyage around the Horn. In that way, I thought I would come to better understand the men who sailed the last square-riggers, and what the experience had been like for them. Maybe I could answer the questions that had bubbled up with such urgency in our Cape Horn refuge.

South from our storm anchorage, past the low sheltering headland, lay the Horn, and beyond it, the Southern Ocean. That’s where the wind ships would have been a century ago: fifty or a hundred miles out, or several hundred, close to the Antarctic drift ice, beating endlessly into contrary and hostile wind and seas, mothering their cargoes -- the only reason they were there at all -- struggling to make their westing before they could finally turn north, clear of the continent’s lethal lee shore, towards benign seas, warmth and harbour.

Editorial Reviews

“Armchair adventurers will devour this book about a trip around Cape Horn during the last days of great sailing ships.... Lundy knows the beauty of the sea as well as its malign influence.... A terrific read -- tough, hardy and strong.” -- Alan Hustak, The Gazette (Montreal)

“Lundy’s ocean is as real and nuanced and true as Emma Bovary. [His] exhaustive research shows through every fascinating aside about the minutiae of rigging and the social order of sailors.” -- Kevin Patterson, Globe and Mail, 26 October 2002

“Lundy explores the lives of ordinary seamen in the dying days of sail. Lundy does this admirably, recreating their skill and courage as well as the meanness of their unforgiving shipbound existence…..The strength of the book lies in Lundy’s use of the skills that made his 1988 Godforsaken Sea a bestseller…. He understands the lore and has a passion for the material, delivering powerful and occasionally poetic descriptions, sprinkled with the musings of the best writers about the sea.” -- The Toronto Star

“Agreeably discursive….There is also plenty of lore….He succeeds, for the voyage ends with us knowing precisely what a sailor meant when, meeting yet another heartbreak, he exclaimed, ‘Who’d sell a farm?’ It was the short way of crying ‘Who’d sell a farm and go to sea?’” -- National Post
“For the serious sailor, this way of a ship will be desirable reading…. This account is saturated with wonderful detail on every aspect of a late-19th century voyage…. [the] ship is peopled with
realistic characters…. The Way of a Ship serves well as a story of what life was like for thousands of nameless seamen, many lost to sea, and until now to history.” -- Edmonton Journal

“Derek Lundy’s new book, The Way of a Ship, takes a number of different tacks to paint a complete picture of life aboard a four-masted square-rigger in the dying dails of sail….Anyone with even a modest interest in sailing ships will find The Way of a Ship an engrossing, entertaining, if at times overwhelming read.” -- The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax

“Fascinating. I don't think I've ever read anything that so authoritatively brings to life what it was like to sail a square-rigged vessel.” -- Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea

The Way of a Ship … is ultimately a hearfelt paean to the hard men of that era and technology, to the thousands who were wrecked or swept overboard or went missing, presumed lost.” -- Quill & Quire

Praise for Godforsaken Sea:
“Dramatic . . . Powerful . . . Remarkable . . . Derek Lundy’s riveting and wonderfully expressive chronicle [is] a compelling example of creative non-fiction at its best.” -- Ottawa Citizen

“Lundy does a wonderful job . . . the writing is superb and engaging.” -- The Globe and Mail

“In his eloquent Godforsaken Sea . . . Lundy not only makes stirring narrative drama but also draws the lineaments of an archetypal hero, a human driven by fear, addicted to adrenalin, in need of the edge.” -- The New York Times
"One of the best books ever written about sailing. Lundy's knowledge of sea lore and history is rich, his pace perfect, his intelligence full of energy." -- Time

"Goes beyond the events at hand to explore our fascination with the sea, and, as [Lundy] quotes Melville, 'the tiger heart that pants beneath it.'" -- Outside