Toledo of Leith

The last time I was at Heltermaa was a year before we sailed in there in Racundra, when I came there on foot, after walking from the other side of the island, where I had landed from a small timber-carrying schooner in which I had sailed from the mainland. I came to Heltermaa by the road from Kerdla, and was hurrying back to rejoin the Kittiwake at Baltic Port. It so happened that I came there on a day when there were no means of getting across the Sound to Hapsal, and I was disconsolately trying to arrange with the innkeeper to let me sleep the night on a bench, when two sailors came in buying provisions. I tried them in my own language. One of them knew a few words, and told me that the captain of his ship spoke English, and that I had better come with them. I asked him where his ship was, and he pointed far out to sea, where, sure enough, a large steamship was lying.

I helped the men to carry a sack of potatoes, a tin of kerosene, milk, butter, bread and a lively little pig down to the tiny harbour. They had a small open boat, with a jib and spritsail, tied under the quay. We stowed everything into it, the pig squealing all the time with the regularity of a mechanical siren. We could not talk, but divided the labour in silent agreement. One man took the tiller, the other dealt with the sails, and I nursed the little pig. Within half an hour of my trudging into Heltermaa I was at sea, slipping rapidly over the four or five miles that separate Heltermaa from the Erik Stone.

As we came nearer, I was surprised at the way the ship was lying, broadside on to the wind and perfectly steady, across breaking waves. She was aground. Then, as we came nearer yet, I saw that her shrouds were dangling round the masts and that she had been stripped bare. She was not, as I had supposed, a passing ship sending ashore for provisions. She was a wreck. I asked how long she had been there. “Two years or more. We are waiting for high water,” said the man.

There was a rising wind, and we approached the wreck at great speed, shot round under her stern, luffed, lowered the sails and caught hold of a rope-ladder. As we came round under her stern I looked up for the name and read, “Toledo: Leith.” Here in this most unexpected of places was a British ship. I ran up the ladder and climbed over the bulwarks and down on the rusty shell of what once upon a time had steamed in all the pride of new paint and shining brasswork out of the Firth of Forth.

A small boy was hanging some fishing-nets to dry. He pointed aft when I asked for the captain, and, bending to avoid the nets and fishing-lines that were hanging under the upper deck, I groped my way towards the stern. Captain Konga, well over six feet high, came out of a sort of hutch he had rigged up between the decks. He greeted me in English, invited me into his cabin, told me I must stay the night with him, and promised to put me over to the mainland in the morning.

I have seen many cabins, but none quite like that hutch in which the captain of the Toledo had his comfortable being. It was built of baulks of wood set up on end between the iron decks. It was six feet six inches high, long and broad. That size, Captain Konga explained, he had found by experiment to be the most convenient. Sitting on his bunk, he could put wood on the stove in the corner, light his reading-lamp, take a book from the opposite shelf, eggs or bacon from his store-cupboard, reach down his saucepan or frying-pan from the hooks on the wall, or get the boatswain’s whistle, with piercing blasts of which he summoned the members of his crew. From any place in it he could reach every other place, and that, he said, was the most labour saving kind of house.

He told me the story of the ship. She had been captured by the Germans in the summer of 1918. She had been aground on the shallows close by Heltermaa, but one wild night, while the Germans had all been drinking ashore, a strong westerly wind had so raised the waters in the Gulf that the Toledo floated off, and when the Germans came to look for her in the morning, she had floated far out to sea, and by miraculous chance had settled herself on this small shoal by the Erik Stone. The water had fallen again, and the Germans had lost the war and left these parts before it had ever again risen high enough to let them get her off. Then the Salvage Company had taken her over and Captain Konga had come to live on board. Once only in the previous winter, she had floated for a few minutes, but the ice round her was so thick that with the instruments at his command he could not shift her, and the sinking water had left her again in her place. Today the water was rising again. “Another four inches and we shall have her moving,” said Captain Konga, and showed me the cables he had laid out astern, the little boiler and donkey-engine he had brought from Reval, and his other arrangements for pulling her into deep water the moment she should float. Actually, as we stood there, we could feel that she was on the point of floating. He had a marked pole over the side, and from time to time looked at it, to see if the water was still rising.

“Yet she isn’t worth much, nowadays,” he said. “The Germans stripped her of some things, and when they went the local pirates did the rest. They took everything, even pulling the engines to pieces to get the nuts. Nuts make good sinkers for fishing-nets. The portholes have all gone. All the new schooners built on Worms have fine brass portholes made in Edinburgh.”

And here for two years Captain Konga had been living and enjoying himself most mightily. He shot seals which came and played by the rock. He painted the rock red. He shot duck. He fished. All passing boats took supplies of fresh fish from the Toledo. He made his own nets, and for his own amusement he kept his log, accurately as if at sea, but each day in a different language⁠—Estonian, German, Swedish, English, Russian⁠—ringing the changes on these five. He was delighted to talk English, and told me he had a friend in England, a very pretty young woman, living near Hull. He had taught her Russian and she had taught him English. “A very pretty young woman,” said he. I asked him when he had last seen her, and he told me, twenty-five years ago. I hardly liked to suggest that the young woman might now be older, for he seemed so certain that for her at least time had stood still. “And so merry,” he added, “and so active. Runs like a hare and dances⁠ ⁠… you should see her dance!”

Time, for Captain Konga, did not exist, except that he never had quite enough of it for all he wished to do. When I offered to send him newspapers, thinking foolishly that he might enjoy them, living alone out there on the wreck with Heltermaa as his metropolis, and that only approachable in fine weather in his little boat, he thanked me, but said he would never have time to read them, his life was so busy, what with birds, seals, fish, and the making of cartridges and nets and fishing-lines, drying, salting and skinning. He was enjoying himself enormously, and, as we talked, I perceived that he always had enjoyed himself enormously, looking neither before nor after, but wholeheartedly engaged in whatsoever he was doing. And he had done strange things, hunting bears in the Arctic, hunted himself by the women of the Samoyeds maddened by the drinks of civilization. He had his whole life at his fingers’ ends. It was all contemporaneous for him, and talking of this or that, as he taught me how to make a net, he would refer to events of thirty years ago as if they had happened that same afternoon.

Next day it blew so hard that it was almost impossible to stand on deck, except in the shelter of the bulwarks, so I spent another night with Captain Konga, netting, and hearing tales of the Estonian coast, of Ungern Sternberg and his wreckers, of the people of the Tutters islands, who will not let the Salvage Company approach a wreck before the men of Tutters have finished with it. “The sea was black with their little boats, and as I came near with a tug, they shouted at me to keep off, and waved every man a gun to show that they were aimed.” “But that was a long time ago,” said I. “It was last year, or the year before. These people do not change so fast. I’ve had to show that we have guns to keep them off the Toledo. The Dagö folk are quiet enough, but the men of Worms⁠ ⁠… and the men of Worms are sucking babes beside the pirates of Tutters.”

On the second morning the sea was going down and the wind was less, and the captain and one of his men lowered away the little skiff that he had for fishing. There was just room for the three of us in her. We sailed due E. to the island of Worms, thinking that I should there catch the postman’s cutter for Hapsal. We came upon patches of rocks, awash and out of the water. Then the man lowered the sprit, reducing the sail by one-half as we threaded our way among them. Now and again we were skimming over less than a foot of water. Once we stepped out and carried the boat over a shallower place. Then out in deep water again, and the little boat, which was Captain Konga’s special pride, fairly slipped across the waves. We landed on the eastern corner of Worms by Sviby, but the post cutter had gone, and the captain looked at his watch. It was just possible that we might catch the train at Hapsal. We were off again, but as Hapsal came in sight saw the train steaming in the station. It is nearly two miles from the pier to the station. The thing could not be done. “How many minutes have we?” asked the captain. I told him. He said nothing, but turned aside from the fairway leading to the pier and steered straight across the rocky shoals at the station. We touched once, again, and sat every moment expecting to ground for good. But luck was with us, as it must always be with such as Captain Konga, and with two minutes to spare he ran the boat ashore and I jumped for the train.

That autumn the water gave him his chance and he took it, pulled the Toledo off, and with the help of a tug from Reval took her to Helsingfors. I felt sorry for him when I heard it. As a salved ship, in these days, I do not suppose the Toledo was worth much, nor would his share of that be large. But as a fishing and shooting box, for a man like him, who knew how to use every moment of his time in such pursuits, she was without a better in the world.