A sailor’s lonely end
Because of the way we sail today, bristling with emergency satellite rescue systems, self-inflating lifejackets, and life-rafts, it is easy to overlook the fact that being lost at sea was, while no less disastrous before the advent of technological assistance, once commonplace. This was brought home to me while talking to Kevin Fuller, the 66-year-old owner of a beautiful West Solent One Design, Mischief, which he moors on the River Blackwater in Essex. I had gone to meet Kevin to look at his remarkable collection of Arthur Briscoe etchings. He has collected over 200 such artworks over the years.
Kevin is downsizing from a six-bedroom home to a four-bedroom house and is therefore obliged to sell off many of his Briscoe drawings along with other marine artists’ work.
A lifelong collector of all things maritime, Kevin showed me a curio he’d picked up as a schoolboy: the log of a 19th Century yacht voyage for which he had paid two shillings and sixpence (12p) in a junk shop in his home town of Maldon.
In a fine copperplate the loose leaf pages were wrapped in blue calico and as I unwrapped them discovered an account of the 43ft gaff cutter Charter Oak’s voyage from Connecticut in the USA to Birkenhead in the UK in 1857. The passage took 36 days from Connecticut, which the ship’s company left on 22 June, to the Tuskar Rock off the south-east coast of Ireland, which they reached on 26 July. It took a further day to sail to Birkenhead.
They had no chronometer, or chart of the English coast, and the skipper, C.R. Webb, had an unnamed crew who had never been to sea before. Skipper Webb built the boat himself and was proud to make the overegged
boast that, ‘This Lilliputian structure has created the proudest sensation throughout the whole civilized world and more especially Europe.’
He reported how, upon arrival in the UK, an 85-yearold former East India Company master came to check the boat was really only 43ft long; ‘he measured her himself with his own hands’, he said.
Skipper Webb continued to rhapsodise, in his curious prose, about his craft which was made from a 237-yearold oak tree: ‘The fame of that old tree shall go down to posterity emblossomed on our nature’s page of history until the last existence of this huge rotundity of earth.’ When I read the log I had to go over the early pages twice, so casually did the skipper recall a man overboard: ‘John Armstrong fell asleep at the wheel, the boat gybed and knocked him overboard. Consigning him forever to the mighty deep.
‘After this sad grievance I was left with no one who understood the compass but myself. I soon put things in order and squared away for Old England.’
His other, unnamed, crew, already suffering mal de mer was understandably badly shaken.
‘The seasick man begged me to turn back for the U.S. but this was utterly impossible for the reputation of both myself and the vessel was at stake.’
Ghoulishly the voyage was logged as the ‘first two-crew West to East crossing of the Atlantic in a sail-boat’ by the late D.H ‘Knobby’ Clarke in his book of maritime record passages: An Evolution of Singlehanders, making no reference to the fact she started out three-handed because, like as not, Clarke never knew.
Unlike skipper Webb’s delight at his boat ‘going down to posterity’, poor old John Armstrong’s part in the venture was not even mentioned.
Time was when such tragedies were considered part of the sailor’s lot.
The seasick man begged me to turn back, this was utterly impossible