Is a beautiful boat’s appeal universal?

Admiring the craftsmanship of a beautiful boat is one of my favourite pastimes. Whether it’s a Contessa 32 or a Corribee, an America’s Cup Class 12 Metre or an Albin Vega, a West Solent One Design or a Westerly Centaur, the love I have for these craft is unconditional, and shared by all those who have a place for sailing in their hearts. The love of one’s vessel goes back years, although not every vessel garners the same reaction from everyone. My grandfather, Richard Stephens Durham, was an apprentice in deepwater sail at the turn of last century. He made passages on a three-mast barque, the Pass of Killiecrankie, carrying coal from Wales to Chile and guano back, sailing the wrong way around Cape Horn. As an 85-year-old man, he told my 15-year-old ears how a fellow apprentice he was sharing the yardarm with, fell, hitting the side of the ship before falling into the sea – they were on the weather side.

‘I can still hear his boots going “bong, bong, bong” down the side of the ship,’ he told me.

So it was interesting for me recently to come across a book in a charity shop called Cape Horn Breed, published in 1956 and written by a retired sailor named William Jones, who had been engaged in the same trade as a youngster that my grandfather had experienced.

Jones was aboard a full-rigged ship, the steel-hulled British Isles, laden with Welsh coal, when in 1905, and bound for the west coast of South America, they had Cape Horn abeam 58 days out from Port Talbot. However, westerly gales kept them tacking to and fro between Antarctica and the Horn for a further 52 days.

In that time, they lost three seamen overboard and another from head injuries after a sea swept him into the scuppers. A fifth had a gangrenous leg amputated and eight were incapacitated by frostbite. And yet, even after all that, this is what Jones wrote:

The big wind ships of the last days of sail were glorious creations of the skill of man, beautifully adapted in their era to the purpose for which they were designed. When they became obsolete and then extinct, something splendid vanished from the world, to become only a memory and eventually a legend, which seems, in a fully mechanised world, almost incredible.

My own experience of the bewitching qualities of beautiful craft came aboard the humble Thames barge – not exactly a Jane Fonda among ships, but winsome nevertheless. Cambria was the last vessel to trade under sail alone, and I was mate in her for her final 14 months in commission.

We weren’t popular in the London Docks as the stevedores had to rig out the ship’s derricks to load us because, thanks to her rig, we couldn’t pass beneath freighter’s mooring lines and lie between the ship and the wharf, enabling the more efficient dock cranes to discharge the cargo.

‘What you come here to load, cannonballs?’ and ‘Where’s Nelson, down the cabin?’ were the sort of remarks made by the cheesed-off Cockney dockers when Cambria turned up instead of a motor barge. But on one occasion, the brickbats turned to beatitudes.

Cambria was loading from a German ship, the crew of which were watching the rigmarole of derrick discharge from the bridge, when one said to the other: ‘If this is all England has, how come she won the war?’

At which, a docker dropped his freighthook, looked up and replied: ‘If this is all we had then how come you lost it?’

While working barges and tall ships carrying coal might not appeal to all, beauty, it seems, is in the eye of the bemoaner.

Ships of the last days of sail were glorious creations