What the Traveller Saw Read Free

of eighteen square sails; there were also seventeen fore-and-aft sails including five headsails. With all this canvas set, which was rare – we never set royal staysails – Moshulu carried 45,000 square feet of sail. The biggest sails, set on yards which were 95 feet long, were made from No. 1 canvas and each weighed more than a ton, much more when wet.
    Moshulu could carry sail when a lesser ship would have had to heave to. In 51°S, 158°W on the way to the Horn, with the wind WSW, force 11, she was still carrying a foresail. Three hundred lines were belayed to pins on the pin rails on deck, or else were led to cleats or bitts. You had to know the name of each one in Swedish – the official language in which orders were given in the Erikson fleet – and be able to find the right one, even on a pitch-black night with seas coming aboard.
    Half the foremast hands in Moshulu the year I sailed in her were first voyagers – the total complement was 32 – and although many of them were country boys with strong constitutions, all of them, including myself, found the work hard at first. An American wooden clipper of the 1850s, Donald McKay’s Sovereign of the Seas , 2421 tons, had a crew of 106. Thework of handling the great acreage of sail, even with the aid of brace and halliard winches, was very heavy. Thirty-four days out from Port Victoria, two days after we passed the Falkland Islands on the way home, we started changing sails, bending a complete suit of old, patched fair-weather canvas for the tropics in order to save wear-and-tear on the strong stuff, first unbending the storm canvas and lowering it down to the deck on gantlines before stowing it away below deck. This was always done when entering and leaving the trade winds in the North and South Atlantic, four times in all on a round voyage.
    While we were engaged in this work, it started to blow hard from the southeast; then it went to the south, blowing force 9 and then 10 from the south-southwest, when the mizzen lower topsail, a heavy canvas storm sail, blew out. This was followed by a flat calm and torrential rain. In the middle of the following night a pampero , a terrible wind that comes off the east coast of South America, hit the ship when it was almost in full sail, but because the Captain knew his job we only lost one sail.
    In these twenty-four hours the port and starboard watches, eight boys in each, took in, re-set, took in and re-set again, twenty-eight sails – a total of 112 operations – bent two new sails and wore the ship on to a new tack twice, an operation which required all hands, including the kock (the cook), to perform it.
    I was in the port watch. The starboard watch were very unlucky – everyone was unlucky some of the time; they spent eleven consecutive hours on deck, or in the rigging.
    Strangely enough, I look back on the time I spent in Moshulu with the greatest pleasure, and would not swap it for the highest honours of the land.

Home from Home
ITALY, 1942
    O F ALL THE COUNTRIES I have ever been to, Italy is the one I feel and know and understand best, by which I mean that I know Italy intuitively rather than in the sense of having accumulated a mass of factual information about it. Its politics are impossible to understand and its history, apart from its artistic history, peculiarly baffling. One soon gets fed up with Guelphs and Ghibellines. I find that what really interest me most about Italy are its inhabitants.
    I was twenty-two years old when I first set eyes on it through the periscope of a submarine. What I saw, against the sun in the late afternoon of an August day in 1942, was a low-lying coast shimmering in the heat, an undulating black line, like some minor tremor on the Richter scale, which might have been anywhere.
    That night, when my companions and I hauled our canoes up out of the surf on this same coast, for the first time in my life – although I had travelled something like one and a half times round the world