Racundra’s First Cruise

To
Racundra’s Estonian Friends

Map

Author’s Note

More than once in the log of Racundra’s little voyage I have mentioned that I found changes made by the war unrecorded in the obtainable charts. I have just received from the Estonian Admiralty, through Mr. Edward Wirgo, a set of charts they have recently issued which cover the whole of the delightful cruising ground among the islands, and should certainly be obtained by the skippers of any other little ships who think of visiting these waters.

The Building of Racundra

Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.

It is for that reason, perhaps, that, when it comes, the desire to build a boat is one of those that cannot be resisted. It begins as a little cloud on a serene horizon. It ends by covering the whole sky, so that you can think of nothing else. You must build to regain your freedom. And always you comfort yourself with the thought that yours will be the perfect boat, the boat that you may search the harbours of the world for and not find.

That is the story of Racundra. Years of planning went into her before ever a line was drawn on paper. She was to be a cruising boat that one man could manage if need be, but on which three could live comfortably. She was to have writing-table and bookcase, a place for a typewriter, broad bunks where a man might lay him down and rest without braising knee and elbow with each unconsidered movement. She was to carry her dinghy on deck to avoid that troublesome business of towing, which has brought so many good dinghies to their latter end. She should not be fast, but she should be fit to keep the sea when other little boats were scuttling for shelter. In fact, she was to be the boat that every man would wish who likes to move from port to port⁠—a little ship in which, in temperate climates, a man might live from year’s end to year’s end.

Then came friendship with a designer, the best designer in the Baltic, whose racing boats carried away prize after prize in the old days before the war, whose little cruisers put to sea when steamers stayed in port. And after that Racundra began to exist on paper. There were the lines of that stout nose of hers, of that stern, like the sterns of the Norwegian pilot cutters. On paper, I could sit at the writing-table a full yard square, in the cabin where (the measurements proved it) I could stand up and walk about with unbruised head. On paper was that little cockpit where one man, sitting alone, could control the little ship as she made her steady way over the waters. Then came the sail-plan, after how many alterations; a snug rig; you could reach the end of the mizzen boom from the deck and there was no bowsprit. The size of the mizzen was such that you could keep the sea and keep up to the wind with mizzen and foresail alone. The balance of the sails was such (again on paper) that if you wished you could sail under mainsail only, or under main and mizzen, so that you could take down your staysail before coming into port and so have a clear deck for playing with warps and anchor chain. Racundra, on paper, grew in virtue daily.

It had come to such a pass that I woke from dreams at night sitting in that paper cockpit, with a paper tiller under my arm, steering a paper ship across uncharted seas. Racundra had to be built. There was no escape. But my friend the designer, Otto Eggers, lived in Reval, and since the war had had no yard, or he would have built her himself, since the two years of paper boat-building had made him share my madness. But there was no help for it. He could not build. I had to build somewhere else, and, since I was to be in Riga, came to terms with a Riga builder.

I pass over as briefly as I may the wretched story of the building and the hundred journeys over the ice to the little shed in which Racundra slowly turned from dream into reality. She was to have been finished in April. She was promised to me on May 1st, May 15th, May 20th and at short intervals thenceforward. She was launched, a mere hull, on July 28th. I went for the hundred and first time to the yard and found Racundra in the water. The Lettish workmen by trickery got the builder and me close together, planted us suddenly on a wooden bench which they had decked with beanflowers stolen from a neighbouring garden and lifted us, full of mutual hatred, shoulder high. The ship was launched. Yes, but the summer was over, and there had been whole weeks when Racundra had not progressed at all while the builder and his men did other work. He promised then that she should be ready to put to sea on August 3rd. She was not. On August 5th I went to the yard and took away the boat unfinished. Not a sail was setting properly. There were no cleats fixed. The centreboard was half up, half down and firmly stuck. But, under power and sails, somehow or other, I got the ship away and took her round to the lake, had her out on the Yacht Club slip, removed the centreboard, had a new one built, re-launched her, and just over a fortnight later turned the carpenters out of her and put to sea.

But there is no use in reminding myself now of those miserable angry months of waiting, in remembering the lacquer that was not put on, the ungalvanized nails that I had laboriously to remove from the cabin work and replace with brass screws. The hull of Racundra was right enough, and, by the time we had finished with her, we had put right the lesser matters that were wrong. Fools build and wise men buy. Well, I shall never build again, and in all probability shall never have money enough to buy. Nor shall I have need. For Racundra turned out to be all that I had hoped. We took her to sea in the Baltic autumn; we had her at sea when big steamers reported damage from the heavy weather, and never for a minute did she show the smallest sign of disquiet. Weather that was good enough for us was good enough for her, and, when the Equinox flung her home with a last flick of his mighty tail, she sailed through the rollers on the bar and up the troubled Dvina, demure, serene, neat, as if she were returning from a day’s trip in June.

For those who are interested in such things, there is a detailed description of Racundra at the end of this book. Here it is enough to say that she is a centreboard ketch just under thirty feet long with a small auxiliary motor. It is a five-horsepower motor, but, possibly on account of my inexperience, it seemed to need forty horsepower to start it, for which reason I did not use it at all during the voyage.

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.

The Start

On August 19th I got rid of the carpenters, near ten o’clock in the evening, and spent the better part of the night in clearing overboard the mess they had left behind them. A good deal of the mess they had, after the manner of carpenters, built into the boat, and I shall not be able to get rid of it until during the winter I undo much of the work they did. Much of the work they were supposed to do they had not done, but I had suffered enough from them, and learnt that they were prepared to work for another two years on the boat if I should allow them. If only to save her from them I had to put to sea. The inside of the boat was unpainted, except that I had slapped a single coat over the cabin walls and cupboards, doing one side first and, when that was dry, shifting all the litter across the cabin and painting the other side. An incredible amount remained to be done. But it was already very late for cruising in these parts, and the last of the yachts that had left Riga for summer voyages had returned for the winter before ever we left that little harbour in the lake. So, though locks did not work, though there were no fastenings to the forehatch and none to the companionway, though forecastle and kitchen were still raw unpainted wood, though cleats were lying about not yet fastened into the decks, though we had only half a dozen blocks worthy of the name, the rest being the clumsiest makeshifts, we knew that if we did not start at once we should not start till next year. We three looked her all over and decided to get away anyhow and finish things up on the voyage.

I slept in Racundra that night, as I had done for the last two weeks, but for the first time slept in a cabin not half full of shavings and carpenters’ tools. At 5:30 in the morning of August 20th I jumped overboard for the last time in the Stint See and swam round Racundra as usual while porridge was cooking on the Primus. An hour later the Ancient Mariner came on board, followed presently by the Cook. The wind was N.W., and we were able to slip with it out of the little harbour and reach the whole way down the lake to the entrance to the Mühlgraben, which connects the lake with the Dvina River. There was not much wind, and we had time to screw in the cleats for the staysail sheets before we had any tacking to do. All three sails were setting abominably, as we had no battens for them, the builder having failed us. I had decided to make the trip to Reval without them, knowing that I could there get them properly made.

The entrance to the Mühlgraben is narrow, and in tacking through it, Racundra refused to stay and ran her centreboard into the mud. We got off, however, by pulling the board up a few inches, after which there were no more shallows, and we crawled very slowly from side to side between the canal wharves and the balks on the other side which cage a sea of floating timbers. A British steamship, the Baltabor, was loading in the Mühlgraben, and Captain Whalley, who has known Racundra from her birth, since he visited her in the builder’s shed, was on the bridge as we struggled by. The Ancient and I had agreed that two leads were unnecessary, and had therefore each left his own lead at home, so I hailed Whalley as we passed and begged the loan of a five-pounder. Racundra went on, zigzagging obstinately through the narrow canal, while I tumbled into the dinghy and dropped back and hung on to Baltabor’s ladder while the lead was found and lowered away to me. We should often have been in a sore pickle without it.

I thought we should probably be all day getting through the Customs at the far end of Mühlgraben, and therefore asked Captain Whalley to luncheon on the Racundra; and he, who accepted, must afterwards have had the blackest thoughts of me, for, as it turned out, we were held up for only half an hour, and decided to work on to the Winter Harbour at the mouth of the Dvina, hoping to make our peace with Whalley when we should meet him in Reval, where the Baltabor was to call.

The Customs House at Mühlgraben is a little yellow wooden building, with flowers in the window and a wicket-gate in a wooden paling on the quay. It stands at the corner where the Red Dvina joins the Mühlgraben, and we let go anchor off it, on the windward side of the channel. I hurriedly discarded my disreputables and put on creased trousers and newly pipe-clayed shoes, in order to make up as far as I could for the “un-yachty” appearance of Racundra, a trait of hers which is normally our joy, but is likely to increase the difficulty of dealing with officials. Racundra lay there, a regular little ship, “a proper contrabandist,” as she has been described, looking, with her ochre topsides and sharp stern, exactly like any one of a hundred Baltic smugglers, while her “owner and master” paddled himself ashore in the very neatest of new varnished dinghies, looking as idly rich as he was in reality busy and poor. It was ten o’clock precisely, and as I had given this time in arranging yesterday with the Chief Customs Office in Riga, I felt our punctuality as a sort of moral pipe-clay and, papers in hand, tapped at the door of the little yellow house with a most satisfactory confidence. I found there a charming young man who talked English and gave me a certificate of clearance without any fuss. He rang up the dock police on the telephone. A harbour policeman, together with a Customs officer from the town, had arrived as the clock was striking, and, everybody being delighted by his own and everybody else’s punctuality (the rarest of all things in Eastern Europe), and this being the first occasion on which a foreign-going yacht had been cleared here, passports were stamped in two minutes, another certificate added to the first, after which all three officials left the little wooden house with me, to visit Racundra and, by drinking vodka on board, to fulfil the last formalities.

When they saw my dinghy swinging like a nutshell below the lofty wooden landing-stage, they refused emphatically to travel in her, wrongly thinking that she could carry only one. They took a boat of their own, and I rowed off as hard as I could and got a bottle of vodka open and mugs on the cabin table before they arrived. We gave them bread and butter, ham and vodka, and they gave us good wishes and the completest freedom from the red tape in which, had they chosen, they could have tangled us as spiders tangle flies. Twenty minutes after our first arrival, they were pushing off again and we were free, our papers stamped, Racundra cleared for foreign parts and already, as it were, abroad.

Elated by this, we gave only half a thought to Whalley. There was still so much to do on board. More cleats to be fixed, backstays rigged, brass bollards substituted for the sharp edged rubbish with which she had been disfigured, and we were all for pressing on down to the river mouth, to the Winter Harbour, where we could lie in peace, finish our work and be ready to slip out into the Gulf the moment the wind should favour us.

We beat out into the broad Dvina River. There was very little current to help us, though I remember early in the spring the current was so strong that sailing upstream in the Frida, a little trading cutter, against a local smack, the race was decided by the fact that the other boat passed us stern first, going backwards, while we were just able to hold our ground, and that in a good wind with the water foaming under the bows of both boats. On this occasion we were not so fortunate, and while we were wearily beating down the river we were passed with the utmost ease by a little racing sloop from Riga, sailed by a friend of ours, “the cavalry sailor,” a young man who had often amused us during the summer by his habit of coming aboard straight from his barracks and wearing high boots and spurs when on his boat. He went by at what seemed to be a great speed, and turned into the Bolderaa, a tributary of the Dvina, after hailing us and wishing us luck. “He wouldn’t pass us like that if we were at sea in anything of a wind,” said the Ancient, and we were glad to be comforted, for it is not pleasant to be passed even by a racing boat.

There was plenty of shipping in the Dvina and several coasters were lying at anchor near the mouth of the river, evidently thinking that the northerly wind was not done with us yet. The sight of them confirmed us in our intention of stopping in the Winter Harbour for long enough to get things shipshape, and at ten minutes to two Racundra, after raising our spirits by showing what she could do with the wind behind her, when we put the helm up to run back into the harbour, was swinging to her anchor in a good berth near the red railway bridge.

There were clouds in the N.W. after luncheon, but we had a few hours of warm sunshine, and, while we worked on the boat, the Cook went ashore. She said that after seeing what we could do with in the way of luncheon she was afraid she had not enough provisions. We told her that there was a time-honoured rule of the sea: “If grub runs out, eat the Cook.” She went ashore in the dinghy with little hope, as it was Sunday, but came back with eggs, black currants, radishes, an extra hunk of cheese and some more potatoes, to find Racundra really looking more like herself, with backstays rigged, boards for the sidelights fixed to the shrouds, the compass screwed in its place, gimbals set for the Primus stove, and the cabin-lamp rescrewed on the case of the centreboard chain (which runs up through the cabin roof) in a position where it could no longer split the ceiling by excessive fervour.

But while she had been away the weather had grown worse. Dark enamel clouds in long banks were drifting up; the wind, still against us, was increasing, and rain was visibly on its way towards us. A Dane and a German had joined the anchored coasters in the river, and we were ready to accept their judgment and spend one more night before putting to sea. The Cook started the Primus. The Ancient and I went on with our work on deck, but, nervous for my new sails, I broke off to put the covers on the main and mizzen, unshackled the staysail sheets, and stuffed the rolled up staysail into a canvas kit-bag. I had just finished as the first drops fell. The wind suddenly grew really strong. Racundra snubbed at her chain once: only once, for we were letting out more chain before she could do it again. And then came rain, rainbows, lightning, thunder and squalls all together, and we were glad to close the companion hatch behind us and settle down to a meal in the cabin, and then to smoke and look at charts and be glad we had not started. It grew dark, and through the cabin windows we could see the lights of the coasters and the foreigners heaving violently in the swell that came in from the river mouth.

The dinghy lay astern, fast by her painter to one of the newly fixed cleats. “Would she be stolen?” I asked, remembering the loss of a mainsail in Lahepe Bay and the many tales the Ancient had told me of such lamentable happenings. “It is better here than in the Mühlgraben,” said he. “Now, if we had stayed there we should ’a had to put a watch on her all night.” He went on to tell a story of a German captain who put his head out of the deckhouse in answer to a call out of the dark, and found a man in a boat alongside, holding up the end of a rope. “ ‘Good rope, sir,’ says the man, ‘and going cheap. I don’t rightly know myself how much there is of it, but for so much, I’ll sell you the coil.’ The captain looks at the rope and sees that it was right enough. He takes that rope on board, the man in the boat passing it in to him hand-over-hand. There was a big coil, and he paid for it and turned in. In the morning he calls the mate and tells him what a bargain he had made in the night. ‘As good rope,’ says he, ‘as ever I brought with me from Hamburg. Why,’ says he, with one foot on the cabin floor and the sleep dropping from his eyes, ‘it might be the same rope and for a quarter the price.’ And indeed it was the same rope, for them thieves in the Mühlgraben, they had just taken the end of the rope off the foredeck and brought it along aft outside and sold it in on board again, and everybody in the Mühlgraben was telling that story afterwards, everybody but one man, and that was the Dutchy captain who had made such a wonderful bargain.”

Riga to Runö

By nine in the morning of the 21st, the wind had shifted to the west. There was sunshine and, in the river, the coasting schooners were getting under way. So we hoisted sails, learnt that our windlass was useless, got our anchor by hand, and made off out of the harbour for the mouth of the river. A heavy swell was coming in; there was still plenty of wind, and we were much annoyed to be held up by a hail from a man on the Customs House Quay at Dünamünde. We had thought that yesterday’s ceremony at Mühlgraben had left us definitely cleared, but it seemed that we had to hand over here the certificate I had got from the Riga Customs. The swell was so big that I was more than half afraid of smashing Racundra against the pier. The man explained by shouts what he wanted, and we sailed as near as I thought we safely could, wrapped the certificate in a rag, with a bit of chain as a makeweight, and threw it on the pier as we cavorted past. The man grabbed it, opened it, and waved his hand down the river. We were free.

Racundra switchbacked over the swell, taking only a drop or two of water over her nose as she dipped and then lifting easily enough, but taking fountains of water through her centreboard case, the top of which had been left uncaulked. That, however, we put right in a minute or two. And then, just as we cleared the moles, the wind suddenly fell away almost to nothing, while the swell remained and we rolled about so uncomfortably that only iron-fastened wills prevented the seasickness of the entire ship’s company. It was half-past eleven before we passed the first bell-buoy. Half an hour later the wind died altogether, and we wallowed in a dead calm, while the booms banged impatiently from side to side, and the two mechanical logs (a German and an American, both secondhand and quite useless) which we were testing one against the other, hung perpendicularly like plummets in the sea. We had a rather hesitating luncheon, and then, at 2 p.m., the wind, which had taken no notice of my efforts on the accordion, gave us another little puff, in response, I believe, to my rendering of “Spanish Ladies” on the whistle. For two hours Racundra pointed north, and when we threw matches overboard she left them undeniably astern. At four we were in another desperate calm. At 5:30 I bathed and swam about the ship, with Riga Lighthouse still in sight bearing south, and the second buoy, the “howling buoy,” ten miles out, bearing a little west of north. We had a few more slight puffs and then calm, then a few more puffs, and then, as the sun went down, a little land wind came out of the S.E. and carried us at 8:40 past the second buoy. We were now fairly at sea, and the wind holding, at 9:20 we boomed out a spare staysail as a spinnaker.

At ten o’clock the others turned in. For the first time not on paper and in dreams, I had the little ship alone in my hands in a night of velvet dark below and stars above, pushing steadily along into unknown waters. I was extremely happy. At midnight the wind swung round to the N.W., and for a moment I thought of calling up the Ancient to take the tiller while I shifted sails. Then I thought I might as well have a try by myself and call the others only if I could not help it. I lashed the tiller and handed the boomed staysail. Then with all the sheets in we were back again on our course, close-hauled now, and I was at the tiller listening anxiously to know if the others had heard my hurried running to and fro on deck. But if Racundra had been a sentient thing doing her best to help me, she could not have done more than she did. The whole operation had gone like clockwork, and the others had heard nothing, and did not know of the change in the wind or even of the wind’s increase, until 4:30 a.m., when the Ancient came on deck and wondered what I had done with Riga light, which had seemed close aboard when he had gone down to his bunk.

During the night the binnacle light blew out again and again and finally refused to be relit. I steered by the North Star, which I kept bobbing about between the maintop and the peak. Our compass had not been adjusted, and a number of bearings I had taken on our way out had made it pretty clear that we had a lot of easterly deviation. Theoretically our course should have carried us eight or ten miles east of Runö. Practically I was sure that we should pass it much nearer, but, as the Ancient had small belief in deviation and said the compass was “right enough,” I was prepared to try it out. After the Ancient came up and took the tiller I hung about the deck to see the dawn, which came up with fiery red splashes over a nickel sea. With the dawn the wind backed to the S.W., when we eased off the sheets, after which I went below and was instantly asleep.

At 7:30 I was waked by a feeling of excitement on board, and was told that Runö Island was in sight. I ran up on deck to see a low line of trees with a pale red lighthouse above them exactly over our bows. The easterliness of our compass was proved beyond a doubt, for even the Ancient could not suggest that we had been making leeway against the wind. But interest in this technical point was sunk in our delight at seeing this, the most romantic island in Northern Europe, at which we had so often looked on the chart that all summer had hung on the wall of my room. The spot on the chart, which long ago, sailing further north in Slug and in Kittiwake, we had so often promised ourselves to visit as soon as we should have a seaworthy ship, was becoming a reality before our eyes. I suppose most readers of this book have already lost the ecstatic joy of sighting land at sea. Yet, no. I do not believe that even for the oldest mariner that joy can ever fade. It is always new, always a miracle, never in the common ruck of absolutely predictable events. Islands especially stir the blood, and Runö, that lonely place, over fifty miles out from Riga and nearly as far from the Estonian coast, with its Swedish seal-hunters using words that in Sweden have become archaic, living in the twentieth century a life of medieval communism, a place at which a steamer calls but once a year, coming up out of the sea before me, sought and found (however incorrectly) by my own little ship, gave me moments of unforgettable delight. The sunlight strengthened. The dark line seen through the binoculars became visible forest. The pale red tower began faintly to resemble the very inaccurate drawing of it which, as a guide to mariners, is tucked away into the drab mainland of the English charts of the Baltic. Under the forest appeared white lines and splashes, which the Ancient said were breakers but the glass showed to be sand. Then, as we came nearer, we could see the deserted beach and the broken-down wooden pier not to be visited by any steamer until July next year. There is anchorage off that pier in westerly winds, but it is unsafe if the wind blows on shore. Just now the anchorage was protected by the southern end of the island, and we steered directly for the pierhead. I took the tiller while the Ancient worked the lead, and we sent silent thanks to the Baltabor for lending it. “Three fathom,” called the Ancient. “Two⁠ ⁠… Two and a half⁠ ⁠… Two⁠ ⁠… Two⁠ ⁠… Two and a half⁠ ⁠… One and a half⁠ ⁠…” Then down with the staysail, in with the sheets, round into the wind, and, as she began to go astern, “Let go.” The chain rattled slowly out and Racundra, pulling up to it, had found her first anchorage in foreign waters.

The wooden pier, which was in two pieces, the middle part of it having been washed away, was fifty or sixty yards from us. On the pierhead was a huge rusty anchor, a trophy from a wreck, or a keepsake from some vessel that had had to slip her cable because of some sudden change of wind and had not been able to come back and claim it before the islanders had fished it from the sea. Behind the pier lay sand-dunes, behind them enormous pines bigger than any I have seen even in the forests of Russia, and behind the trees the upper works of the lighthouse, an ugly structure of red iron tubes. The anchor and the lighthouse and the wrecked pier were the only things that spoke of man. The shore was deserted. There was not a human being to be seen. We sounded our foghorn, thinking that maybe they would send out a boat. Nothing happened, and, half doubting if after all we had found the proper anchorage, we unlashed the dinghy, turned it over, and with the spare staysail halyards lowered it into the sea. The Cook and I tumbled in and pulled ashore. The wind showed signs of changing, and we knew that if it veered farther to the south we should have to be off again without delay.

Our landing on Runö was like a page from Robinson Crusoe or a child’s dream of desert islands. We rowed in past the broken end of pier and, in shallow water, tied up to the rotting timbers of the part of it that ran out from the land. We climbed up and, stepping carefully over the crazy planking, came to the sandy shore. Hummocks of sand rose before us, but north and south of the strip of sand we could see rocks out in the water. And there, almost on the edge of this tideless sea, were those gigantic pine-trees, growing out of a thick mossy carpet rich with brown and scarlet mushrooms. On a pair of rough wheels made of solid wood without spokes rested one end of a felled tree roughly trimmed. But as we went in under those tremendous arches of the forest there was an uncanny absence of any human sound. The sand dunes hid the pier. The towering trees hid the non lighthouse. There was nothing but the green-carpeted forest, cloisters for giants, and that great trank on wheels exactly like those that must have been made by the first wheelwright in the history of our race. Man, should he appear, might be of any kind. Almost, we looked up in the treetops for pygmies with their poisoned arrows, and watched the trunks of the trees for the feathers of one of Fenimore Cooper’s Indian braves.

And then, slowly wandering towards us, knocking off the heads of the mushrooms with his stick, came man indeed, the Governor-General of the Island, a short, lame, elderly man in blue canvas clothes and a seaman’s cap, the keeper of the lighthouse, to whom the men of Runö come for a casting vote in all debates. He has no official authority; no laws confer power on him or limit it; but⁠ ⁠… he is the Keeper of the Light, the guardian of the one piece of civilization imposed on Runö by the mainland, the representative of those who do not live on islands, and, I suppose, tradition invests him with a sort of dignity. In old days he was sent by a Tsar of Russia to keep the light of this little island in a sea surrounded on all sides by Russian territory. The men of Runö are Swedes, and a Tsar of Russia had driven their race from the mainland. But nowadays the sea of which Runö is as it were the central pole is no longer Russian. Its coasts are Latvian and Estonian. The Tsar is no more, and the Swedes of Runö can hardly think with any great humility of the two little nations which argue, fairly bitterly, as to which of them should really own the island on which, indifferent to such politics, the Swedes live on, preserving their own life and their own customs in an odd kind of private Middle Ages, centuries removed from the modern competitive struggle of the continent.

The lighthouse-keeper greeted us. He had heard our foghorn, and since the people were busy with their harvesting on the other side of the island had himself come down to meet us, and to warn us that the wind was changing and that we must soon look to our ship. He knew a few words of English, but more willingly spoke Russian, which he knew well, besides, of course, Estonian and Swedish. He was surprised to see us so late in the year, and, on learning my nationality, asked with the embarrassing curiosity of foreigners to whom this bit of our mingled foreign and domestic affairs is always hard to explain, “Well, Mister, and how is it with Ireland?” This was the first of several such disappointments, for I had hoped in voyaging among these remote islands to be quit of politics for once. But I hid my feelings and told him that the Irish were settling their affairs in the Irish way, and then got him to talk of his own country.

I knew already that on Runö competition is almost unknown. Instead there is a sort of ancient communism. The men of Runö are seal-hunters, and at a later stage of our cruise we met some of them actually at their work. Each seal killed belongs not to the lucky hunter but to the community as a whole. The land has been divided into workable farms, and if a family increases it cannot acquire fresh land. It merely adds the necessary room space to the farmhouse, and often does not even do that. If a son marries, he builds himself a bed, which is set up in the room of his parents, and twenty years later, if his son marries and the grandparents are still alive, another bed is built. You can number the families in a Runö house by counting the double beds in the main room. There are two hundred and seventy persons on the island. The women wear on holidays the national costume of old Sweden. Coming out of church on Sundays (they are devout Lutherans) they are as uniform as a procession of nuns. The men wear homespun clothes and sealskin shoes. Their morals are said to be strict. I have heard that some years ago a woman offended against their code, whereupon they tried her by general assembly and condemned her to death. It was found, however, that not one of them was willing to kill her. So they fastened her in the bottom of a little old boat and set her adrift in a storm. The boat did not sink, but was thrown upon the Courland coast, and the woman, still alive, was found by fishermen, recovered, and, one is left to suppose, continued her wicked career on the mainland, where people are less critical.

The lighthouse-keeper told us that people were beginning to take an interest in Runö; that this year the steamer had brought them Mr. Piip, the Estonian Foreign Minister, and a very great Englishman (our own Minister from Riga), but that these events did not much affect the islanders, who had never considered themselves Russians, nor indeed anything else than men of Runö, and were content to remain so, and to be counted Estonian, seeing that their business, when they had any, was with Arensburg; that they caught their seals on the Estonian rocks, and that, after all, the lighthouse-keeper had always been sent from Reval. He took us with him to see his lighthouse, where he posed for his photograph very nobly with the lighthouse behind him. It had been higher, he said, but the Germans had blown off the top of it, besides making a horrible mess of his house. Civilization had visited Runö after all. At the lighthouse we had a drink of fresh water, and then, as the wind shifted definitely to the south, had to give up all thoughts of staying longer on the island, and hurried away over the thick moss under the gigantic trees, picking mushrooms as we went, and so to the broken-down pier.

We were none too soon. Racundra was bobbing up and down in a manner undignified for her, and the Ancient had lowered the peak. Where the water had been smooth it was already broken. We pulled out in the dinghy, getting well splashed on the way, hauled it on board, got our anchor, hoisted the staysail, filled on the starboard tack, and were off for Paternoster and the entrance to the Moon Sound.

Runö to Paternoster

It was half-past one when we got away, and, as we were anxious to take no chances with the rocks on Runö’s northern corner, we sailed due east for a mile before putting Racundra on her course. I must point out here that until we reached Helsingfors, though our courses were duly set by compass, there was very considerable discrepancy between theory and practice. After the Runö landfall I allowed a full point for easterly deviation in the neighbourhood of north, and this proved to be about right when, in Finland, we had magnets put in and swung the ship. But on other points the error was even greater. Our logs also were of small use for navigation. Of the two, the German log did not work at all, and the American, which we used, was a most pessimistic affair. Unless we were going at our top speed in half a gale, it registered a little less than two thirds of the distance we actually covered, and, if we were not visibly and sensibly churning along, the log seemed to lose heart altogether and registered nothing at all. I think it had begun life on a motorboat and had no patience with our old-fashioned but superior ways. Its remarks were of use only in giving us the roughest ideas as to what we had been doing.

The wind was now S.S.W. but continued to back to the south, and at 3:40 we brought the booms over. It was a fine day and pleasant sailing, and, whatever the log might say, it was clear enough from our own wake that we were steadily moving towards the Estonian coast. The only question in our minds was where we were going to hit it and when. We did a lot of straightening up on board, drank coffee by the pint, and ate huge quantities of food. We were all greatly cheered by our speed after the dismal experience of yesterday’s calms, and the Ancient began to think we should be in Reval tomorrow and to talk of record passages.

“One time,” said he⁠—“one time I crossed the North Sea in twenty-four hours under sail.”

“Where was that?” I asked. “Harwich to the Hook?”

“No,” said he, with a sail-needle between his teeth, finishing the end of one of the halyards. “It was from that place up at the North of Scotland⁠ ⁠… like the Moon Sund, where we’re going.”

“Pentland Firth?”

“Ay. Pentland. Twenty-four hours from there to the Norwegian coast.”

“Pretty good sailing.”

“And I had my captain sick all the way. Yellow fever. That was how it was. We were in Mexico when he began ill, and I wanted him to go ashore. But he was Norwegian, and he would have it that back to Norway would put him right. And I thought myself, ‘Maybe the fresh airs at sea will put the fever under.’ But it was not like that. Every day he grew worse. I wanted to put up into one of the American ports to put him ashore, but he wouldn’t have it, and was all for carrying on and getting home to Norway. And we did carry on, too. I can’t tell you how long we were on the passage, but we had a west wind with us all the way, till we were near the Irish coast. I wanted them to put through the Channel, and let him see a doctor at Southampton, or one of them places. But he wouldn’t have it, and, sick as he was, set a course round by the north of Scotland. ‘ ’Tis the best way for Norway,’ he says. And we came through the Pentland Firth, and he was so bad that I was for hauling our wind and coming to Aberdeen. But he would have nothing of it. And the west wind held and plenty of it, and the captain in his fever shouting, whenever I spoke to him, not to take a foot of canvas off her. And we made the Norwegian coast in twenty-four hours. And then we went into Christiansund, where he was from, and as soon as the anchor was down he went ashore, and as he went I told him I’d come ashore and see him in the morning. But it was not like that. I never saw him again, for he died during the night.”

I had set a course that, if the error of the compass was about what it seemed to be, should bring Racundra within sight of the well-lit coast to the west of the Paternoster Lighthouse, so that we might learn our exact position in plenty of time, and was consequently delighted when at 10:15 we picked up a blinking light on the starboard bow. The Ancient took the tiller while I ran down below for a stopwatch. I timed it. One flash every three seconds. I looked at the chart which I had spread out on the writing-table in the cabin. No such light was to be found upon it. I looked again all along the coast of Oesel. No. There was a four-flash light on Laiduninna and nothing else between that and Paternoster. I ran my finger across the chart, which I was lighting with a little electric pocket-lamp. Away to west, far out of our supposed course, near the approach of Arensburg, a blinking light was marked, but the period of its flashes was not named. If it were that, then how humbled must be the pride of the navigator. I could feel the Ancient waiting in the dark to hear me, having timed the light by a method (the stopwatch) in which he did not believe, admit that I did not know what light it was or where we might be. It was a most unpleasant moment. So I said nothing at all.

“What course?” asked the Ancient.

“E.N.E.,” said I, to give myself time. I had just remembered that there was yet hope for my navigation. We were working by the big German chart of 1915, the only comparatively large-scale chart I had been able to get. But in the chart case was an English small-scale chart covering the Riga Gulf as well as much else, and this had been corrected up to the spring of this year. I pulled it out and spread it on the folding-table under the lamp in the cabin. And, as I looked from yellow splash to yellow splash (lights are marked in this way) going from west to east along the Oesel coast, behold, the very last light on that coast before the light of Paternoster at the entrance to the Sound was marked “1 flash ev. 3 sec.,” with the date “1920.” My expanding joy almost lifted off the cabin roof. I went on deck again a different man from that cringing, worried navigator who was glad that the dark hid the doubt in his face. For some few minutes I said nothing. Then, with all the ease I could assume, I said lightly, as if it were nothing: “Keep a look out for a flashing light on the starboard bow.” By changing our course we had brought my first treasure trove to port. “And then,” I added, “we should find another light to port, with a white flash every second; and when that turns to red, we shall have our course clear for the entrance.”

The Ancient answered not a word, but there was a new warmth in the night air, a new solidity in the floor of the steering-well, and various other minor indications of rewarded confidence. I went below and smoked a most satisfactory pipe.

We were not moving fast, and it was three hours later before we had the other two lights. But I was secretly glad we were moving slowly because, confidence or no confidence, I did not want to try too much and attempt the Moon Sound in the dark. In spite of the evidence of the English chart, I was glad enough to have our course confirmed by meeting at 3 a.m. a steamer going S.W., which I knew must have come out of the Sound. I took the hint and altered our course a little accordingly. A little later, the white light of Paternoster turned red and then our last doubts were gone, and, as the dawn rose, and with it the wind strengthened from the S.E., we found ourselves exactly in the entrance to the Sound, Paternoster Lighthouse on its island on our port, Werder on our starboard bow, islands and rocky coast stretching away behind us to the south and west, and before us the Sound itself.

Through the Moon Sound

The actual entrance to the Sound is a couple of miles wide, with the little island of Virelaid on the western side and the larger mass of Werder on the eastern, each with its lighthouse. Then, though in some parts of it the shores recede and in places are over twenty miles apart, the actual channel narrows, twists and turns with such sharpness that big ships have more than once gone aground through attempting a corner too fast or at a time when the current was too strong against them. I suppose there are few sections of sea chart on which so many wrecks are marked. There is, of course, no tide, but the water rises and falls according to the prevailing winds, which also determine the direction of the strong current in the narrows. The Russian battleship Slava is still to be seen high out of water on the Kumora Shoal. The British merchantman Toledo, after three years of waiting, was only last autumn hauled off the shoal by the Erik Stone. Few British skippers care to attempt the passage by night, and one of the most careful, who did so venture, lost several plates from his ship’s bottom as his reward.

We, of course, were attempting it by day, and, as dawn broke and at 5:30 we had Paternoster Lighthouse abeam, the wind strengthened mightily from the south, and, from the slant of the spar-buoys, we could see that we had not only the wind but also a strong current with us. We had the most favourable possible conditions. At the same time, I was not going to take any risks on Racundra’s maiden trip. With our shallow draught we could, no doubt, have cut off many corners. We draw, even with the centreboard down, no more than seven and a half feet. Our good friend Baltabor, on her way to Reval from Riga, avoids the Sound and goes round outside the islands if she draws over fourteen feet. I decided to attribute fourteen feet to the modest, the admirable Racundra, and pilot her through exactly as if she were a big ship. In this way we should have ample margin for the correction of any errors due to eccentricities of current or the like.

Passing Paternoster, we opened Kuivast on the island of Moon, a little anchorage where there is a landing-stage, a coastguard station, an inn and a telegraph. I had meant to stop there an hour or two, but the conditions for passing the Sound were so good that I visited Kuivast only through the binoculars. Two or three schooners were at anchor there, waiting for a favourable wind to take them south. The inn looked tempting enough, but, there it was: that glum log of ours was spinning merrily as a top, the sun was bright, the wind fair and strong, the wooded island of Shildau showed ahead, through the glasses I could already see one of the pair of beacons that, kept in line over our stern, would guide us through the next bit of the channel; after all, there were plenty of stopping-places ahead, and we could visit Kuivast homeward bound. So I put the island of Moon resolutely aside and looked over the bows at Shildau, and searched the pale blue windswept water before us for a bell-and-light buoy, which I presently found. Racundra foamed past it, and I brought it in line over her stern with the lighthouse on Sareots Point, the western end of Werder. The sun shone, the wind blew, and there was the second beacon on Shildau, at first hard to see, close down on the shore under a background of dark-green pines. And then Shildau was abeam, then on our quarter, and behold, that dimly discerned second beacon grew clearer, separated itself from the trees, stood out, moved slowly nearer and nearer, close to, and at last was in line with the first. Up to starboard with the helm, over with the booms, and off goes Racundra, with those two beacons in line over her stern, through the narrowest stretch of channel, a lane between the shoals close by the N.E. corner of the island of Moon. And there, sure enough, on the low green ridge of that island, seeming at first to be in impossible positions, but straightening themselves out as we sped along, were two tall beacons of open ironwork, fantastic, unmistakable things, each with a dark iron corkscrew or snake twisting from the top to bottom in a narrow iron cage. Woods, windmills, green pastureland, houses, and those beacons, looking like Mr. Wells’s monsters from another planet striding over the earth, all changed places in a vast quadrille as Racundra hurried on her way. Suddenly the two monsters began noticeably to draw nearer to each other. They were within shouting distance of each other. They were in close converse. They were one. The corkscrew of one monster linked with the corkscrew of the other, the two cages merged into a single cage, and then, to port with the helm and sharply, and Racundra, shaking the waters from her beloved nose, was off again almost at right-angles from her former course, while the Shildau beacons slid rapidly apart, and this new pair remained in magic unity. I took a bearing on the Moon beacons and compared it with the chart, and got additional confirmation of the error I had assumed from our Runö landfall. That was at ten minutes past eight in the morning, and the log was reading 38.4. Half an hour later it was reading 41.6, so that even its pessimism was compelled to admit that Racundra was doing her six knots.

We were now in apparently open water, but the chart was of a different opinion, and, mindful of our temporary fourteen feet, we kept those beacons in line for seven miles, when we passed the light-buoy in the middle of the Sound. Away to the west was the wide shallow inland sea between the islands of Dagö and Oesel. To the east we could see small scraps of islets and knew that beyond them was the narrow bay of Matsalu, from which, more than seven hundred years ago, the Estonians sailed out and away to Sweden, and burnt Sigtuna, the Swedish capital, and carried away its silver gates. After passing the light-buoy, we held on our course for another seven miles or so, when we sighted the murderous Erik Stone, a square rock sticking up alone out of the waters; a rock no bigger than a king’s throne, as it is said by some to have been; a rock painted red all over by my ingenious friend Captain Konga, with whom, as you shall hear in another place, I spent two nights on the wreck of the Toledo, aground upon the shoal of which this stone is the uppermost point. Then, the water had been lower, and there was a little island to be seen, and seabirds upon it, but now there was nothing but the stone itself. Far away to the west was the coast of Dagö, and, with strong glasses, we could see the white house and a red roof by the little harbour of Heltermaa. Far away to the east a fantastic iron beacon rose out of the sea, showing where was the narrow passage to Hapsal between the shoals of Odroraga and Rukeraga. We meant to return that way, but we were moving too fast to have time to spare for dreaming about passages to come. There was the Erik Stone; there on the starboard bow the dark woods of the island of Worms; there, as if floating in the sea, the handful of low buildings on the tiny island of Harry; and somewhere ahead another bell-buoy to be found and passed to make the channel along the eastern side of Harry and avoid the rocks off Worms.

The sun shone; the wind blew stronger and stronger; short, stout little waves raced us, caught us, passed foaming and gurgling under our keel and rushed ahead of us to the open Baltic. We were off Worms almost before we had left the Erik Stone, so it seemed. And there sheltering under the wooded island of Worms were the vessels bound south, schooners and cutters at anchor, watching us with envy as we flew past, waiting for the wind to change that was no good to them and suited us so well. Worms, like Runö, is one of the Swedish islands belonging to Estonia. In all the harbours along the coasts of this part of the Baltic you meet stout little ships with Swedish names and the words “fran Wormsö” painted on their broad sterns. You can tell a Worms ship at first sight. You have no need to seek the painted letters. No others have the same combination of beam and lofty freeboard fore and aft. A beautiful sheer these little ships have, with a high afterdeck, the sides of which tumble home with an effect no less practical than lovely⁠—a downward curve to the broad midships and then a proud upward sweep to the bows; in every line the sense of solidity, breadth, ability to keep the seas, and an unbroken tradition of simple-minded builders. The ships are mostly iron-fastened nowadays, but the older art is preserved, and I have seen fine schooners, not more than five years old, in which the fastenings, like timbers and planking, were of wood. For a moment we thought to turn aside, to slip in here under the lee of the island, to make this a stage of our journey and to talk with some of the little anchored fleet. But what would a Worms skipper think of us if we wasted a fair wind? It was not yet noon and the wind showed signs of rising still more. The barometer had fallen and was still falling. The wind would hold, and, going at this speed, we should be in Reval before midnight. So Worms slipped astern and we held on out into the Baltic, still among shoals, but with nothing visible on either hand except the glaucous white-splashed water.

Worms to Pakerort

For some time we steered north by west through a waste of water increasingly disturbed, looking south over Racundra’s stern and keeping a dark pinewood promontory on the south end of Worms just open of the slim, gleaming white tower of Saxbiness light on the N.W. corner of the island. The wind, now really blowing pretty hard, kept shifting, and more than once we had to jibe. We passed one spar-buoy, then another, then found the long expected light-buoy, and north of that a group of four spar-buoys and a solitary pair.

Spar-buoys are the loneliest things in the sea. For those who do not know them I should perhaps have said before that they are tall posts anchored to the bottom of the sea to mark the shallows. On their ends in these parts they carry brooms, one or two, and according to the number of the brooms and to their position, the handles of the brooms being up or down, the mariner learns on which side of the buoy is the danger. The brooms do not long survive the buffeting of wind and water, and these lone sticks with their draggle-tailed besoms far out at sea have a most melancholy appearance in themselves, although the sailor finding his way over the waters is glad enough to recognize them and be assured of his position. We rushed past that solitary pair, jibed for the last time, and stood away E.N.E. for the narrow passage across the reef that almost joins Odensholm to Spithamn.

The wind strengthened in successive stout breaths, and then settled down in the S.E., to blow considerably harder than Racundra had yet had opportunity of feeling. We were some eight or ten miles off the land, and the wind, blowing since the afternoon of yesterday, had had plenty of time to get up the waves⁠—nothing, of course, compared to those there must have been on the other side of the Gulf, but still enough to make a pretty fair test of Racundra’s quality. With her broad beam and heavy keel she stood up to the wind magnificently, of course, but, as she dropped between each wave, something fairly thundered within her, shaking the whole ship. It was the centreboard, and we hauled it up, for, with the wind broad on her beam and plenty of it, the difference it made to her sailing (if any, for she is by no means flat-bottomed) was fully discounted by the pounding effect on our nerves. Even so we were left with a noise to which to grow accustomed⁠—the tremendous crashing of the water under her weather bilge keel as she sank into the trough. As soon as we knew what it was, we stopped worrying, but before we knew we had crawled all over inside her, feeling her sides, inspecting the boltheads of her three-and-a-half-ton keel, and generally expecting unpleasant surprises. Once we knew what it was, it rapidly became unnoticeable, and we were able wholeheartedly to rejoice in Racundra’s manner of dealing with waves, a thing beautiful to see. We took plenty of spray on deck, but no heavy water at all. “She juist joomps out of them like a dinghy,” said the Ancient, restored to happiness after doubts, during the centreboard’s orchestral performances, as to whether the keel was adrift. In the general buffeting she got between leaving the Moon Sound and coming into shelter of the land by Spithamn, only one thing gave way. In the working drawings for her there had been a neat galvanized iron saddle and ring by way of gaff jaws, but the builder, saving money, had not bought it, and, at the last minute, had made wooden jaws, with holes for the lacing bored far too big, thereby weakening a contraption which even apart from that was rather ineffectively held together with screws. Further, the shrouds of the mainmast fell rather far aft, and the mainsail being very tall, the gaff tended to swing forward and press against the shroud, putting an unfair strain on the jaws. We had heard a loud crack aloft, but nothing had come down, and from the steering-well we could see no damage. After sighting the low island of Odensholm with its lighthouse, and finding the two buoys that mark the passage just north of the promontory of Spithamn, where more ships were taking refuge under the lee of the rising ground with its six windmills, we heard another crack. I set a course to take us north of Sandgrund and the rocks beyond Spithamn, left the tiller to the Ancient, and went forward to take a look at things. I saw at once that the parrel rings of the gaff jaws were hanging loose, that the gaff jaws were broken, and that the broken side of the jaws was jammed in place by a halyard, which, bar-taut, was the only thing that kept the gaff from breaking loose. This was pretty unpleasing, but, after watching it for a minute or two, I became convinced that nothing would shift it so long as we held the wind on the starboard side, which we should do until we came to Reval Bay. In any case we were moving finely, and this place, with Sandgrund, Grasgrund and the Locust Rock all to be avoided, was not the one to choose for a stoppage for repairs.

We held on, and Racundra, settling down to her work, justified our trust by the speed with which she hurried eastwards. At 6:05 we had Grasgrund abeam and saw the lonely rock, well out to sea, where in fine weather there is often a broad space of visible ground. On our starboard bows were the islands of Roogö, off which we had been becalmed one summer’s night in Kittiwake. There was Pakerort Lighthouse, tall on its cliff, the witness of how many of our struggles in the recalcitrant but lamented Slug. In the bay on the higher side of Pakerort was Baltic Port. We were already in familiar waters. And, with the thought of Baltic Port, our pleasant anchorage of last summer, came doubts as to the wisdom of standing on for Reval in the dark through what in any other boat we should have called a storm, with so serious a piece of trouble as broken gaff jaws awaiting attention aloft. We should have to beat into Reval Bay anyhow, when the gaff jaws would infallibly come down. It would then be dark. Better beat into Roogowik, to Baltic Port, here, now, in daylight, when, if anything went wrong, we could see what we were about. So, rather nervously, we hauled in the sheets, put the helm down for a moment, and stood close-hauled into Roogowik. But we were already too late. The deep bay running S.E. into the land left us again without protection, we were bucketing into a head sea, Racundra’s speed fell off, and the twilight was upon us. It became imperative to have a look at those gaff jaws while it was yet light enough to see. The Ancient lowered away the peak, which stuck, of course, in the makeshift blocks, then loosed the throat halyard, when the whole thing came down in a tumultuous and entangled rush. Within a minute we had learned that with her staysail and mizzen setting as badly as they then were, Racundra would have a very difficult time beating against a heavy sea under those two sails alone. She absolutely refused to stay (I hasten to explain that now, since we have put things right and given her the tackle she deserves, after generally clearing up the abounding errors in her rigging, she stays with the utmost regularity). We had to wear her each time we went about. Now, Roogowik is a narrow inlet deep to either shore, but with rocks along both sides and an awkward reef running out north of the harbour, which is well into the inlet on the eastern side. It grew perfectly dark. The harbour lights appeared, but there were no lights whatever on the Roogö island shore opposite the harbour. We could not tell how near we were to the land when on the tack that took us in that direction. The wind was extremely strong (indeed, if it had been weaker our position would perhaps have been worse); our sidelights would not burn, and the binnacle light blew out every time it was lit. We found ourselves not snugly making repairs in Baltic Port, as we had hoped, but rushing wildly in the dark from one side to the other of the bay, desperately wearing round when we thought we could afford to go no farther, and gaining absolutely nothing in our struggle towards the green light which meant, as I thought then, a well-known harbour.

Providence, perhaps, was with us, for, as we were to learn a fortnight later, if we had gone in there with the wind behind us, as it would have been if only we could have made the entrance, which is from the south, we should almost certainly have been smashed up. The harbour had been halved in size since last year. The open space through which I should have tried to go to my old anchorage had been blocked by a new pier of black tarred timbers, quite invisible at night, and my old anchorage, behind it, was high and dry out of the water. I do not like to think of what would have happened if, with that wind, we had raced into that blind alley in the dark.

However, we had no chance of doing any such thing. With the darkness the wind increased to a gale and our position became rather seriously uncomfortable, for it became clear that, so far from gaining, we were actually losing ground, and that with each tack we were coming nearer to the reef instead of farther into the bay beyond it. At this point, the Ancient and I had our only quarrel. He wanted to get as near the harbour mouth as we could, drop anchor and try to get a line ashore. I knew the place well from other years, and so knew that the depth was far too great to give us a chance of doing anything but lose an anchor, and that if we got anywhere near the shore, unless actually in the harbour mouth, we should infallibly go on a rock. I was therefore for admitting that Baltic Port was a mistake, for wearing for the last time, getting well out into the middle of the bay and clear of the reef, and then putting the helm up and running out to sea until beyond the precipitous point of Pakerort, when I should bring her up to the wind and remain so till morning. There was a little breathless bitterness on the subject as we shouted at each other and tried to hear what the other was shouting back, and it ended in Racundra pretending she had never wanted to put her nose into Baltic Port at all. She stopped bucketing into the wind, and with sudden restfulness and three times the speed, flew out of the bay with the wind at her heels to the open sea, where she was more at home. The Ancient watched Pakerort light till from the cliff-top it looked down over our stern, and then went below and to sleep. There was, after all, nothing more to be done.

Pakerort to Reval

Then began a wild but, in a curious way, rather enjoyable night. No misfortunes at sea are enjoyable in themselves. He is a liar who says they are and he is a fool who courts them. But when misfortune has come against your will, when it is there, when you have shaken hands with it, realized it thoroughly, and done what you think is the best possible thing to do, there comes a sort of release from further worry which is quite sensibly pleasant.

There was Racundra with her mainsail gone, proved incapable of beating under staysail and mizzen, rigged as they then were in a temporary manner, careering through steep seas in a pitch-dark night with no sidelights and a binnacle lamp that would not burn. On the face of it, misery. Yet there was no misery about it. While in that narrow bay I had been much afraid, but here, in the open sea, things were better. Besides, we were doing the thing which I had myself urged as the right thing to do. It was my own thing, this careering business out here in the dark, and I had the joy of possession. I was still afraid, of course, but knew where I was, and knew what I had to avoid. I had to prevent Racundra from being blown too far out to sea, to prevent her from working sideways to Nargon island, and to make headway if possible towards the shallow bay on this side of Surop, without going on the rocks off the near point of it and without getting into the bay until it was light enough to see what we were about. Wind and sea had clearly made up their minds to knock us and blow us to Finland, or, if we insisted on working sideways, to plant us on Nargon like many good ships before us. Racundra and I were of a different determination, and, as we careered in the dark over waves which always seem bigger at night, I had the definite impression that Racundra was enjoying it also in her fashion. I found myself, who do not sing in happier moments, yelling “Spanish Ladies” and “Summer Is Icumen In” and “John Peel” at the top of my voice. Then the Cook struggled up the companionway with a sandwich. She asked, with real inquiry, “Are we going to be drowned before morning?”

I leaned forward from the steering-well and shouted, “Why?”

“Because I have two thermos flasks full of hot coffee. If we are, we may as well drink them both. If not, I’ll keep one till tomorrow.”

We kept one. We drank the hot coffee from the other and ate a huge quantity of sandwiches. The more we ate the better things seemed. We grew accustomed even to the din. Douses of spray merely made it seem worth while to have put on oilskins. The howling of the wind and the recurrent crashing of the waters became monotonous. The Cook, who had been doing her work as calmly as Racundra, and like Racundra was enjoying it, fell asleep in the middle of a laugh. She was tired out, and when the next big splash woke her, I sent her below to lie down, knowing that there would be plenty of work for her in the morning, whereas there was nothing she could well do at the moment. I do not believe she has forgiven me yet.

After that, Pakerort light and Surop light and the faraway flash of Nargon were my companions. The riding light, the only one of our lamps that would burn except the swinging lamp in the cabin, I had under my knees in the steering-well. With an electric pocket-lamp I had a look at the binnacle now and again. So we went on, hour after hour, until I too fell asleep.

I suppose everybody who has spent long hours at the tiller of a little boat has done the same. But, I admit, I was startled the first time I woke to find myself in the steering-well of Racundra, holding a kicking tiller, with the dark in my eyes and a great wind in my face. The next time it happened I said to myself, “Done it again!” and began pinching myself as hard as I could, in muscles, in any places that seemed to hurt, in the effort to keep awake. It was no use. The lamp was burning all night in the cabin and light came up through the round windows in the cabin roof. I had shifted the riding light from the floor of the steering-well to the seat behind me. A faint divided light was thrown on the staysail and the upturned shape of the dinghy lashed underneath it on the foredeck, and these in successive dreams took different shapes. I found myself wrestling with a large and difficult collar-stud stuck in a stiff shirt, and only slowly came to understand that the collar-stud was the tiller and the white shirt spreading somewhere before me was the lonely staysail. A minute or two later the dinghy was the moulded base of a huge table and the staysail was a corner of a tablecloth most annoyingly put on crooked. “Do put that cloth straight,” I woke saying, and found myself, as before, keeping Racundra up into the wind.

I think that is the secret. One could not go to sleep at the tiller with the wind aft, but, when close-hauled, steering is done so much by feel, especially in the dark, that the ship takes care of the sleeping helmsman. I never once woke with sails flapping, and never once to find that I had fallen off the wind. Racundra took care of her skipper, who was far too tired to take care of himself. Then, suddenly, the sleeping fit passed from me and I was extraordinarily awake, most unpleasantly aware of what I took to be some martial idiot rushing about with a little ship of war showing no lights but the occasional disconcerting flash of a projector. Then came the lights of a steamer from the west (as I learnt afterwards, our old friend the Baltabor from Riga), also at that time, when we were bucketing about without sidelights, a thing of infinite hate. And then, suddenly, with a relief which let me know how great the strain had been, I knew that the eastern sky was distinguishable from the sea. Day was coming at last, and with day the possibility of doing more than hold our own, if indeed we had been doing that.

Day came, or the light before the day, and I found exultantly that I was now not sleepy at all. We had done much better than I had expected in the dark. We were well clear of Nargon and about two miles from Surop. I held on joyfully, no longer thinking of calling the Ancient, who at last, when the sun was up, came on deck and, with that little faith of his, as once before he had looked for Riga, now looked for Pakerort. Everything was hope. We could see what we were doing, and the Ancient dug out the trysail from the solid mass of gear and sails stowed in the forecastle during our hurried departure. We disentangled a halyard and got the trysail up, wore ship after an ineffectual attempt to go about, and stood in on the port tack for Fall and the hollow of the broad bay west of Surop, to get under the shelter of the land for repairs that would let us hoist the mainsail again, without which we were so badly crippled. At last we got into fairly smooth water. We drank the hot coffee from that other thermos flask. The Cook worked one of her miracles and produced great bowls of porridge. The Ancient Mariner made a wonderful job of a manila rope substitute for gaff jaws. This done, the Cook took the tiller while we took off the trysail and hoisted the main. Would it stand or would it not? It stood most beautifully, and with singing hearts we went about on the starboard tack, cleared the rocks by Surop and then, coming nearer to the wind, held on till close by Cape Basanova, the S.E. point of Nargon, where, long before, we had landed on our first voyage in Slug. Then we went about and stood due south, the wind having momentarily backed to the east. We stood into Zigelsko Bay. Reval was in sight for a moment, then blotted out by big rain-squalls. We went about thinking to clear Karlo, but the wind shifted too, and had such strength that even with eased mizzen it took all the strength I had to keep her off the point, which she seemed determined to ram. I ran her off a little whenever I got a chance, but there were moments when it was impossible to do anything but luff, and Karlo, now and again invisible in the squalls, seemed most unpleasantly close. These squalls were, I think, the toughest wind we had throughout the storm, and Racundra, forced over by them, and meeting the short steep waves of the entrance to Reval Bay, shipped more water than throughout the whole of the rest of the passage. The Ancient had left the forecastle hatch open under the overturned dinghy, and until the Cook, guessing what had happened, went forward and closed it from underneath, each wave that came over sent a deluge below. Holding on in the cabin in a sort of whirlwind of flying pots, pans, apples, pipes and other loose lumber, the Cook was persuaded we were going to run her bodily under water, but Racundra’s admirable nose took care of that. We had a wet but exhilarating time clearing Karlo, after which the squalls slackened, and we stood right across the bay towards the low hill and windmill by Miderando, went about there, and tacking with long legs and short, made our way up the bay towards the three ships of the Estonian Grand Fleet and the rock and spires of Reval, dim in the rain, with each tack getting more into shelter and finding things easier, until at last we rounded smoothly into the harbour, picked up a buoy, warped into a berth by the Yacht Club mole, made all snug and had a pretty decisive supper.