The Crew

And now for the crew. There were three of us. There was the Cook, to whom, I think, is due most of the credit for the ease and pleasantness of our voyage. She can take her trick at the tiller if need be, but that, for her, is holiday. All the hard work was hers. She cooked a meal. It was eaten. She washed up and, just as the dry dishes reached the rack, one or other of that hungry company would inquire whether or no the time for the next meal was drawing near. She cooked another meal. As its last remains were cleared away, as sure as fate she would catch the eye of one or other of us looking hungrily at the clock. We, of course, navigating, sailing, had our strenuous moments, after which would follow long hours of plain and easy steering. She, on the other hand, thanks to our appetites, became a sort of juggler, keeping plates, cups, saucepans, kettles, teapot, coffeepot, thermos flasks and Primuses in a whirl of perpetual motion. We, in harbour, idled, fished, and watched the barometer and the weather, sustaining our self-respect by oracular utterance. She, in harbour as at sea, never for a moment was able to give those pots and pans a rest. She might have been dancing on swords and juggling with knives where an instant’s pause meant death. We saw her throughout the day in a cloud of cooking, and the steersman at night, looking down the companion, saw always busy hands cleaning obstinate aluminium, and he who rested on his bunk heard, as he turned in comfortable sleep, the chink of crockery and the splash of washing up. The Primuses roared continually, like the blast furnaces in northern England. And we, relentless and without shame, called continually for food. Of the three of us, the Cook, without a doubt, was the one who worked her passage.

The second of us was the Ancient Mariner. On the Stint See at Riga was a tiny harbour for small boats, where during the long months of waiting for Racundra I had kept my dinghy. There, in a little wooden hut on a raft, lived an old seaman, the harbourmaster of this Lilliput port. On my first coming he had spoken a few words of English. Gradually, day by day, the language came back to him, and with the language memories of a life he had almost forgotten. Many, many years ago he had sailed from Southampton in the famous Sunbeam of Lord Brassey. He had spent fifteen years of his youth in Australia. He had shared in the glorious runs of the old tea clippers. He had been a seaman in the Thermopylae, which he called the Demooply, and had raced in her against the Kutuzak, in which odd Russianized name I recognized the Cutty Sark. And now he was taking care of ten-foot dinghies, and every morning made a voyage across the lake in a rowing-boat with a leg-of-mutton sail to bring the milk from a farm on the other side. He took care of my sailing dinghy as if she had been an ocean liner, made her a padded wharf to preserve her varnish, and spoke of her quick passages across the little lake as if she were a clipper returning round the Horn. He and I became friends, and long before Racundra was finished, knowing that I had planned a voyage to England, he went to see her in her shed and, returning, begged me to take him with me. “I am an old man,” he said, “and I should like once more to go to sea before it is too late.” And I, of course, agreed with joy, for there is no such rigger in the Baltic as the Ancient Mariner who has known what it was to sail in the Thermopylae in the days of her pride.

Then, as the months passed, and we knew that the builder had made the English voyage impossible this year, it was decided that he should come with Racundra on her first cruise. He spoke of Racundra always as “our ship,” and, as we sailed, his ambitions for her grew with every day. “When we are in the Mediterranean,” he would say, “we must make a canvas double roof for the cabin or it will be too hot in there.” And then, “She’ll find the long waves of the Atlantic child’s play after this. It won’t be till she is near the American coast that she’ll have anything as bad.” He, that Ancient Mariner, was on this miniature cruise as happy as a boy. Nothing would make him leave the ship. He never went ashore, except in Helsingfors to look for a particular size of sailmaker’s needles, unobtainable in Riga, and in smaller ports to bring water to refill our casks. “Shore,” he would say, “I have enough of shore at home.” He was a very little man, with a white beard and a head as bald as my own. Sometimes on board he wore a crimson stocking-cap with a tassel, when he looked like a gnome, a pixy or a fairy cobbler. If Queen Mab went to sea she could not find a fitter mariner.

The third of us was Racundra’s “master and owner,” who writes these words even now with the swelling pride that he felt when he first saw them on the ship’s papers handed to him on departure by the Lettish Customs Office. “Master and Owner of the Racundra.” Does any man need a prouder title or description? In moments of humiliation, those are the words that I shall whisper to myself for comfort. I ask no others on my grave.