Cold round Cape Horn
26 December 2019 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI've been reading Basil Lubbock's "Round the Horn Before the Mast" (1902), and it's frankly not suitable reading for winter evenings, even wrapped up in a new Christmas scarf and two pairs of socks! If I hadn't already had a hot bath this morning I'd be tempted to have another one just to warm up...
The book itself is entertaining and very well written, though -- it must have been just on the cusp of the decline in sail freight (and just before the construction of a successful Panama Canal, which would kill off windjammer traffic just as the Suez Canal had, as he mentions, earlier killed off the clipper trade), and the author is at pains to stress how many new ships are still being constructed all over the world. Given his description of the difficulty obtaining crews (particularly since the Americans were apparently tempting away the best seamen by paying twice the British wage, albeit with a reputation for maiming and beating their sailors to a degree not tolerated in Britain and the colonies), and of the number of men and the physical hardships required to get a big sailing vessel through the Roaring Forties even with the wind in her favour -- apparently ships travelling 'outward bound' were doing well if they only struggled beating backwards and forwards for a fortnight in their efforts to get around the southernmost cape -- it's amazing that anyone was prepared to continue doing it once an alternative existed.
Oddly enough I'd been reading Bernard Moitessier's account of the Golden Globe race (where he went off his head after months spent alone at sea and decided to keep sailing in 'high latitudes' such as these instead of crossing the finishing line to claim the first prize that was his for the taking) earlier in the day. In fact I was reading it in the bath (and likewise shivering as the water cooled around me). And he is describing the precise same conditions from the point of view of a far smaller boat -- the four-masted "Royalshire" drives on at ten knots through a gale, whereas Moitessier's little "Joshua" does six, and has to steer north of the low-pressure zones where possible. But she doesn't seem to ship nearly so much water; one of the things that makes the crew's life miserable on the big windjammer is the fact that the main deck is almost constantly covered in water from waves breaking across the ship, and the crew's quarters in the forepeak and 'half-deck' under the poop are flooded at floor-level at best and in danger of being swamped at worst. "Joshua" is basically a watertight bubble where the chief danger from the waves is equipment getting broken by getting thrown around the cabin. Of course, Moitessier spends a lot of time lightening his craft -- obsessively at times, as he gradually throws away everything from repair equipment to ropes that he deems unnecessary -- whereas the "Royalshire" is laden 'down to her marks' with the cargo of grain that is the reason for her existence.
Basil Lubbock, writing from the point of view not of the uneducated ordinary seaman but of the gentleman-adventurer who alternates the stinking job of scooping out the bilges (into the same San Francisco Bay that supplies the city with its water, as he points out with some disgust) with off-duty hours attending the opera and dining at the top of the "San Francisco Call" (newspaper) buildings, manages to convince the reader that this is all rattling good fun and that he was, on the whole, thoroughly enjoying living up to the hardships on board. Indeed, despite his lack of experience he earns himself the reputation of a 'prime hand' and gets called upon by the mates when particularly difficult jobs are required. But the description of the various injuries he receives and the living conditions he undergoes (including being deprived of drinking-water for several days continuously during the worst weather since it was not possible to access the fresh-water tanks without fatally contaminating the ship's entire supply for the rest of the voyage) makes it hard to understand how anyone endured it on a long-term basis.
But he contrives to make the description of the inherently repetitive life on board into a gripping and vivid account. I'm still having some trouble keeping track of who was who among the eighteen or so in the crew and struggling a little to keep on top of the terminology (it took me a long time to master the fact that the 'jigger' is simply the fourth, gaff-rigged mast, as I'm used to fore, main and mizzen -- here the mizzen is not at the rear). The author takes no prisoners where technical terms are concerned, and doesn't explain, for example, why the crew felt it to be morally superior to make progress under lower-topgallant sails while another ship was sailing under lower-topsails (and responded to the sight of them by setting her upper-topsails!) Meanwhile I'm still busy mentally working out that the topgallants are actually above the topsails...
The book itself is entertaining and very well written, though -- it must have been just on the cusp of the decline in sail freight (and just before the construction of a successful Panama Canal, which would kill off windjammer traffic just as the Suez Canal had, as he mentions, earlier killed off the clipper trade), and the author is at pains to stress how many new ships are still being constructed all over the world. Given his description of the difficulty obtaining crews (particularly since the Americans were apparently tempting away the best seamen by paying twice the British wage, albeit with a reputation for maiming and beating their sailors to a degree not tolerated in Britain and the colonies), and of the number of men and the physical hardships required to get a big sailing vessel through the Roaring Forties even with the wind in her favour -- apparently ships travelling 'outward bound' were doing well if they only struggled beating backwards and forwards for a fortnight in their efforts to get around the southernmost cape -- it's amazing that anyone was prepared to continue doing it once an alternative existed.
Oddly enough I'd been reading Bernard Moitessier's account of the Golden Globe race (where he went off his head after months spent alone at sea and decided to keep sailing in 'high latitudes' such as these instead of crossing the finishing line to claim the first prize that was his for the taking) earlier in the day. In fact I was reading it in the bath (and likewise shivering as the water cooled around me). And he is describing the precise same conditions from the point of view of a far smaller boat -- the four-masted "Royalshire" drives on at ten knots through a gale, whereas Moitessier's little "Joshua" does six, and has to steer north of the low-pressure zones where possible. But she doesn't seem to ship nearly so much water; one of the things that makes the crew's life miserable on the big windjammer is the fact that the main deck is almost constantly covered in water from waves breaking across the ship, and the crew's quarters in the forepeak and 'half-deck' under the poop are flooded at floor-level at best and in danger of being swamped at worst. "Joshua" is basically a watertight bubble where the chief danger from the waves is equipment getting broken by getting thrown around the cabin. Of course, Moitessier spends a lot of time lightening his craft -- obsessively at times, as he gradually throws away everything from repair equipment to ropes that he deems unnecessary -- whereas the "Royalshire" is laden 'down to her marks' with the cargo of grain that is the reason for her existence.
Basil Lubbock, writing from the point of view not of the uneducated ordinary seaman but of the gentleman-adventurer who alternates the stinking job of scooping out the bilges (into the same San Francisco Bay that supplies the city with its water, as he points out with some disgust) with off-duty hours attending the opera and dining at the top of the "San Francisco Call" (newspaper) buildings, manages to convince the reader that this is all rattling good fun and that he was, on the whole, thoroughly enjoying living up to the hardships on board. Indeed, despite his lack of experience he earns himself the reputation of a 'prime hand' and gets called upon by the mates when particularly difficult jobs are required. But the description of the various injuries he receives and the living conditions he undergoes (including being deprived of drinking-water for several days continuously during the worst weather since it was not possible to access the fresh-water tanks without fatally contaminating the ship's entire supply for the rest of the voyage) makes it hard to understand how anyone endured it on a long-term basis.
But he contrives to make the description of the inherently repetitive life on board into a gripping and vivid account. I'm still having some trouble keeping track of who was who among the eighteen or so in the crew and struggling a little to keep on top of the terminology (it took me a long time to master the fact that the 'jigger' is simply the fourth, gaff-rigged mast, as I'm used to fore, main and mizzen -- here the mizzen is not at the rear). The author takes no prisoners where technical terms are concerned, and doesn't explain, for example, why the crew felt it to be morally superior to make progress under lower-topgallant sails while another ship was sailing under lower-topsails (and responded to the sight of them by setting her upper-topsails!) Meanwhile I'm still busy mentally working out that the topgallants are actually above the topsails...
no subject
Date: 2019-12-29 10:16 pm (UTC)And I'm still labouring over Plot Point Fifteen at the rate of a sentence or so a day, which is not particularly good for it but better than not working on it at all, which is the alternative. I think part of the problem is maybe that I did have such a detailed list of things that happen in the scene, which hasn't left me much leeway for natural developments out of unforeseen events without ruining the pacing (which remains an ongoing problem).
So far I've spent two chapters dealing with it, including tearing out and rewriting approximately fifty percent of that, and have just started a third chapter at the point at which Raoul comes in with the sedative for Erik -- I'm hoping to be able to finish Plot Point Fifteen and roll over into the start of Plot Point Sixteen in this chapter rather than extend it to a whole extra chapter, having failed to polish it off in the course of the last scene/chapter as I'd hoped. (At the moment I'm just splitting up scenes entirely according to length -- it's all one long Raoul-PoV episode, from the approach to the valley onward).
I've created myself a fresh batch of potential problems by elaborating the concept of Erik's hidden hoard and his supply of poisons, not least the question of what is going to happen to the money afterwards. I based it on some research I did years ago as to the value of Erik's blackmail budget -- which I vaguely remember as being a staggering sum approximately equal to the annual revenues of the largest landowner in England according to the contemporary exchange rates, but I couldn't remember if that was just the 40,000F he actually gets in canon or an extrapolation across the entire year if he kept on bleeding the opera management, so hypothesised that this was added to whatever funds he had acquired earlier from his employment by oriental potentates. But the result of all that is that we are now talking about rather more money than 'enough left to pay for the rebuilding of the farmhouse', which makes the discovery of the hoard into a potentially unbalancing scene (indeed, a theoretical motive to Stefan to murder his employers in this Godforsaken spot and make off with the valuables himself, although I haven't hinted at that!) and brings up the awkward issue of who gets to inherit what Raoul, at least, assumes to be ill-gotten gains.
So again, maybe it would have been better not to have expanded on the implications of that sentence in the summary :-(
no subject
Date: 2020-01-01 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-02 02:16 am (UTC)I have very, very nearly finished Plot Point Fifteen; I'm just wondering whether to leave out the ring, since in this version it clearly isn't on Erik's person where I'd originally assumed it would be...