The Last Grain Race. Eric Newby

       Introduction to the 1981 Grafton Edition

      Although I did not know it when I joined the four-masted barque Moshulu in Belfast in the autumn of 1938, this was to be her last voyage in the Australian grain trade, as it was to be for the rest of Gustav Erikson’s fleet of sailing ships, as well as for most of the German and Swedish ships which took part in the 1939 sailings from South Australia to Europe. In that year thirteen three-and four-masted barques sailed for Europe, eleven of them by way of Cape Horn, and by the autumn all of them were back in European waters; but although one or two of them continued to sail during the first year or so of the war, carrying various cargoes, and some even survived into the post-war years, the big Finnish fleet of Gustav Erikson was dispersed and the ships never came together again to form the great concourse of vessels which lay in Spencer Gulf, South Australia, in the early months of 1939.

      Today there are no more steel, square-rigged sailing ships left trading on the oceans of the world. If any more are built for commercial purposes it seems certain that they will be as different from the barques that I knew as the crews which will be employed to man them will be different.

      Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn in the Baltic was the last man to own a great fleet of sailing ships. He employed no P.R.O.s to improve his image. I never met any foremast hand who liked him – it would be as reasonable to expect a present-day citizen of Britain to ‘like’ the Prime Minister or an Inspector of Taxes. In our ship he was known as ‘Ploddy Gustav’, although most of us had never set eyes on him. The thing that warmed one to him was the certainty that he was completely indifferent as to whether anyone liked him or not. He was only interested in his crews in so far as they were necessary to sail his ships efficiently, and for that reason he ensured that they were adequately fed by sailing-ship standards, and that the ships they manned were supplied with enough rope, canvas, paint and other necessary gear to enable them to be thoroughly seaworthy. He certainly knew about ships. Originally, as a boy of nine, he had gone to sea in a sailing vessel engaged in the North Sea timber trade. At the age of nineteen he got his first command in the North Sea, and after that spent six years in deep-water sail as a mate. From 1902 to 1913 he was master of a number of square-rigged vessels before becoming an owner. By the ’thirties the grain trade from South Australia to Europe was the last enterprise in which square-riggers could engage with any real hope of profit, and then only if the owner had an obsessional interest in reducing running costs. Erikson had to pay his crews (which had to be as small as was commensurate with safety) as little as possible. He could not afford to insure his ships, most of which he had obtained at shipbreaker’s prices; but at the same time he had to maintain them at such a standard that they were all rated 100 A1 at Lloyd’s, or an equivalent classification elsewhere. He was respected and feared as a man over whose eyes no wool could be pulled by the masters whom he employed to sail his ships, and the tremors they felt were passed on down to the newest joined apprentice. Of such stuff discipline is made. A now out-moded word, but sailing ships do not stay afloat and make fast passages at the pleasure of committees of seamen.

      The work of handling the great acreages of sail was very heavy, even for men and boys with strong constitutions. Thirty-four days out from Port Victoria, two days after we had passed the Falkland Islands on the homeward run, with a crew of twenty-eight, which included officers, cook, steward, etc., we started bending a complete suit of old, patched fair-weather canvas for the tropics in order to save wear and tear on the strong stuff, sending the storm canvas down on gant-lines. Sail changing was done always when entering and leaving the Trade Winds, four times on a round voyage. While we were engaged in this work it started to blow hard from the south-east; then it went to the south, blowing force 9 and then 10 and then 11 from the south-south-west, when the mizzen lower topsail blew out. This was followed by a flat calm and torrential rain. In the middle of the night a Pampero, a wind that comes off the east coast of South America, hit the ship when it was practically in full sail. Because the Captain knew his job we only lost one sail, the fore upper topgallant.

      In those twenty-four hours the port and starboard watches, eight men to a watch, took in, re-set, took and re-set again twenty-eight sails – the heaviest of which weighed 1½ tons – a total of 112 operations; bent two new sails and wore the ship to a new tack twice, an operation which required all hands, including the cook, and which took an hour each time it was done. The starboard watch were unlucky, having to spend eleven consecutive hours on deck. This was by no means uncommon. Yet strangely enough, I look back on the time I spent in Moshulu with great pleasure.