Synopses & Reviews
Chapter One Down to the Seas ...as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb
down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
Herman Melville, "Moby Dick
Off the pitch of the Horn. Wind at full-gale strength, waves as high as the maintop, sometimes hail and then snow coming down thick, clouds so low they enfold the mastheads, spume and sky indistinguishable. The laden barque, down on its marks like a half-tide rock, labours to windward under three lower topsails and fore and mizzen staysails, seas sweeping the main deck like grapeshot. The hull twists, pitches and rolls; its iron plates grind and groan. The wind whistles, screams, as it encounters the vessel's four masts and their dense network of standing and running rigging. The ship is close-hauled, heading as close as possible to the direction of the wind; it must contend for every inch to the west, although in this gale, these seas, all it can manage is a stubborn retreat, a slow, grudging slide to leeward, losing as little ground as it can until things improve.
Like the other men of the off-watch, ordinary seaman Benjamin Lundy lies sleeping like a dead man in his sopping berth below. He turned in "all standing" -- that is, still wearing his soaked oilskins and sea boots -- two hours ago, after his watch on deck. His body heat under blankets has begun to dry out his clothes a little; a light mist rises off him, like steam. Seas boarding the main deck spurt through the door, and a foot of water sloshes from one side of the deck house to the other as the ship rolls, sometimes splashing up onto Benjamin in his lower bunk. But he sleeps through this and the deafening clamour of the storm.
Only onething can drag him out of his near coma, and it happens now. The mate's whistle sounds above the wind's racket; someone hammers on the fo'c's 'le door.
A hoarse roar: "All hands on deck to shorten sail!"
No matter what its state of exhaustion, Benjamin's brain long ago incorporated these words as an irresistible stimulus. Almost before he's awake, he has rolled out of his bunk onto the flooded floor. Colliding with other shapes in the cold, pitch darkness, he reels out onto the deck and the familiar wallop of the wind and driven spray.
"Clew up main and mizzen tops 'ls!"
The awakened men join the watch already on deck, and with an unerring orientation in the murky night, they find the lines they need to haul on, a few out of hundreds in the precise, universal order of a wind ship's running rigging. With the seaman's coordinated jerk, they sweat up the sails, no shanties now for this hard-pressed crew. Other lines -- the sheets -- must be slackened off as the sails are gathered into looping folds, flogging in the wind with thunderclap explosions. Several times, the men must interrupt their hauling, belay the lines in a deft flash and jump for the lifelines, or the rigging, anything that's made fast to the ship, as a Southern Ocean greybeard breaks aboard, flooding the deck with tons of overpowering water. In these conditions, it's as dangerous on the main deck as it is aloft.
"Now lay aloft and furl 'em!"
Ben joins his mates as they climb the weather ratlines on the mainmast; the other watch will deal with the mizzen topsail. The wind sometimes presses against his body with such force that he must strain to bring his leg back against it to take the next step up. Hishands, already numb with cold, get colder as they grip the rigging wire. Now he's aware of the deep cuts and cracks in the skin, ravaged knuckles, the salt water burning away at them. He's lost four of his fingernails, ripped away in earlier bloody skirmishes with recalcitrant sails. His oil-skins, hard as metal, rub against the raw-chafed skin at his wrists and neck, the salt-water boils throbbing. The men climb up seventy feet and fan out along the windward side of the yard, slithering on the icy footrope, dodging the flailing number-one storm canvas and gear of the topsail. A mere tip or nudge from the heavy sail and a man could be flicked off the yard like an insect, to die on the deck or in the sea.
The crew of the "Beara Head have been working the ship off the Horn for thirty-nine days, trying to get past this most troublesome of capes. They call it Cape Stiff, an evocative nickname of unknown origin. They began to win the war only a few days ago. In this austral winter of 1885 the westerly gales have come on them one after the other, no breathers in between. The six-week campaign has changed the seamen. From a sometimes fractious and ill-sorted gang, the unending storms have sculpted a desperate but united and determined unit of men who suffer and work without complaint. The equation is simple: they will live only if the ship survives, and so they fight to save the ship. The ship is everything, and in the fierce tumult of wind and waves, paradoxically, they have learned one of the sailor's most profound, and tender, lessons: what Conrad called the "serious relation in which a man stands to his ship." They know in their guts, unconsciously and without articulation, that theyowe the ship the fullest measure of their thought, skill, self-love. They may be, as Conrad described all crews, "a small knot of men upon the great loneliness of the sea," but they will be saved by their instinctive devotion to the ship. Only then can it do its best for them, which may be good enough, maybe not ...
Review
“The wealth and authority of this book make it a worthy companion to the very best histories on seafaring.” Sunday Times (London)
Review
“A tribute to the seamen of the Age of Sail.” Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
When, as a young man in the 1880s, Benjamin Lundy signed up for duty aboard a square-rigged commercial sailing vessel, he began a journey more exciting, and more terrifying, than he could have ever imagined: a treacherous, white-knuckle passage around that notorious "graveyard of ships," Cape Horn.
A century later, Derek Lundy, author of the bestselling Godforsaken Sea and an accomplished amateur seaman himself, set out to recount his forebear's journey. The Way of a Ship is a mesmerizing account of life on board a square-rigger, a remarkable reconstruction of a harrowing voyage through the most dangerous waters. Derek Lundy's masterful account evokes the excitement, romance, and brutality of a bygone era -- "a fantastic ride through one of the greatest moments in the history of adventure" (Seattle Times).
About the Author
Derek Lundy is the author of Godforsaken Sea: The True Story of a Race Through the World's Most Dangerous Waters. He lives in Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, with his wife and daughter.