Adventures in the Trade Wind

By Richard Dey

This is at once the biography of an Englishman who became the pioneering charterboat skipper of an American yacht, and a history of the charterboat business in the islands. Morris Nicholson’s story reflects a time now all but vanished in the islands, beginning when they were neglected colonial outposts and a single yacht meant income for the islanders. In no other book is there an account of how skippered yachts, bareboats, and headboats came to sail the Caribbean Sea and became an economic sector. However it is Nicholson’s story—and his stories of others—that drives the narrative and fills it with human interest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 20, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462821631

Richard Dey

RICHARD DEY was graduated from Harvard College where he studied under Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop, and was Poetry Editor of The Harvard Advocate. As a young man he sailed in the schoolship Tabor Boy, out of Marion, Massachusetts. Dey has worked as a yacht skipper and crewman, commercial fisherman, journalist, editor, and as a professor of maritime literature and history along the Atlantic seaboard and Lesser Antilles. He is the author of Selected Bequia Poems, a book set in the West Indies, and Adventures in the Trade Wind, a history of yacht chartering in the West Indies.

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Dey.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

First Edition

Rev. date: 07/20/2022

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

543461

OFFSHORE PRESS

Weymouth, Massachusetts

For my father and mother,

Richard Addison Dey and Ruth Morris Dey

Contents

Illustrations

1     Cruise of the Enid

2     Among the Windwards

3     Eleuthera II in Europe

4     Hanging Out in Vigie Cove

5     Caribbean Circumnavigation

6     A Very English Harbour

7     Out of Grenada

8     The Purchase of Hope

9     On Charter

10   Among the Grenadines

11   Out of Bequia

12   At Hill House

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Frontispiece: Morris Nicholson, 2000

The Enid, Falmouth, England, on the eve of her departure, 1951

Lunch on the Enid, Falmouth, England, 1951

Morris Nicholson on Smuggler’s Row, Tangiers, Morocco, 1951

Bert Ganter with unidentified yachtsman

The Nanin, née Speejacks, hauled out for propeller replacement

Postcard of Port Elizabeth, Bequia, c. 1950

Postcard of Sunny Caribbee Hotel, Bequia, c. 1950

Rear panel of Nicholson yacht detail folder showing accommodation plan of Eleuthera II

The sketch Eleuthera II under sail

Schooner Zaca

A donkey used to drive the mechanism with which wells were pumped or boats were hauled out on a railway in the Balearic Islands

Vigie Cove, Castries, St. Lucia, c. 1954

James Charles, crewman, and Jaime Tur Mari, cook, Castries, c. 1954

Eleuthera II in Rio Ozama, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Front panel of Nicholson yacht detail folder: Schooner Mollihawk

Flica II departing English Harbour, c. 1957

The ketch Ring Andersen

St. George’s harbor, Grenada, c. 1974

The banana boat Geestcape, St. George’s, Grenada, with the schooner Jacinta alongside

MV Xebec, likely the first motorboat in the charter business

The Nicholson brothers, Morris and Peter, c. 1966

Yachts at anchor, Fort-de-France, Martinique

Eleuthera II, at anchor, English Harbour, Antigua

Jaime Tur Mari in the galley of Eleuthera II

Shelling dredge

Gus and Jane Koven, Hope House, Bequia, 1976

Damage to the cockpit of Eleuthera II after a rogue wave struck off the coast of Columbia

Eleuthera II and Eric and Susan Hiscock’s Wanderer IV in Admiralty Bay, 1976

Admiralty Bay from the foreshore

Hill House under construction, 1983

Suzanne Walker at Hope House, Bequia, 1983

The bones of the Westcountry trading ketch Enid, Windward, Carriacou, 1974

The seaman looks out over the sea as the farmer looks out over the land. There is meaning in everything: the long swell running in under little wavelets, the gulls hovering over the riffle, the paling of blue water to green, the patch of white off the rocky headland. There is never a sense of monotony, even though there can come a sense of great fatigue, of wanting to get away from the sea, that cruelest of taskmasters and most capricious of mistresses. There is always the underlying tension that comes from fear; any man who knows the sea has known fear—not necessarily the fear of death, but the fear of an ordeal that has to be undergone to be understood, the battle against a tireless and impersonal foe. Occasionally the sailor does put the oars on his shoulder and walk inland until a curious native asks their purpose, but soon he is trying to pawn them to speed his way back to the coast. No man who loves the sea can ever know peace unless he can look out over water, even if only from the shore.

—Carleton Mitchell, Islands to Windward

1

Cruise of the Enid

It is the bliss of ignorance that tempts the fool, but it is he who sees the wonders of the earth.

—Frederic A. Fenger, Alone in the Caribbean

H e was standing on the deck of a local schooner, destitute after the English ketch he had crossed the Atlantic in had been sold out from under him. He had sailed overnight from Martinique in the schooner and stood on the level deck watching the harbor come into focus in the fresh morning light. He knew he was more or less in the middle of the Lesser Antilles, the crescent-shaped archipelago that stretches six hundred miles between the Virgin Islands and Trinidad, dividing the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean Sea, but he did not know anything more. Why should he? An early morning rain had fallen on Castries. Destitute as he was in the schooner Colombie , he was nevertheless cheered, he recalls, by the total din of the peepers and the scent of flowers that seemed to come with the morning light, as the local vessel tacked easily and silently into the harbor. At least in Castries, capital of the British colony of St. Lucia, he could speak English. In his pocket was two hundred dollars U.S., or about one-fifth of his investment in the ketch Enid . The money was in the form of traveler’s checks, already signed in the two places, by whom he forgets.

This practice was quite common; no one worried about identification in those days, Morris says. A cat jumps onto his lap as a pause in the music comes with one disc changing to the next.

On the beach in St. Lucia? I ask. We are sitting on a veranda, on a succession of January days and nights over several years, shielded from the sea blast by a spray of bougainvillea. Up from Hope Beach, five hundred feet below, comes the muffled roar of the surf, waves driven in from the open sea by the trade wind and breaking on the shelving shore. A green glass fishnet float, found washed-up on Hope Beach and hung from a beam overhead, sways in the trade wind that drove it west over the open sea. We are looking out over several small islands in the Grenadines, one of which, lit up like a cruise ship and populated by the rich and famous, was little more than a fisherman’s camp when Morris, not unlike the glass float, turned up on the beach.

A thin smile crosses his ruddy face, lights up his pale blue eyes. I was supposed to be sailing around the world!

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Morris Nicholson was working as a draftsman in a large electrical engineering firm in Ipswich, Suffolk, when a friend dropped a copy of the magazine Yachting Monthly on his desk. Nick, what do you think of this? he asked, showing Morris a small classified ad. It was the spring of 1951.

‘Crew wanted to participate in purchasing a boat for a proposed round-the-world cruise,’ it read, or something like that, Morris recalls. No details at all were given, of course. It must have given an address, though, for a response.

His friend, Derrick Hills, was quite enthused over the ad but was engaged to be married, so his interest was strictly imaginative. Morris, on the other hand, studied the block of small type, which was about the size of a train ticket.

One morning Morris motorcycled up to London from Woodbridge, where he was living, and found his way to Chelsea. The ad had struck a chord in him, deep and hidden. He had written the Stevensons, who had placed the advertisement, and they had written back a four-page, handwritten letter about their idea. Everyone who responded got the same letter explaining the deal, which was £350 ($1,000 U.S.) for the voyage around the world, with a £35 down payment. His parents had suggested he go meet them.

The Stevensons lived in an ordinary house in a quiet area. It was a two-story, red-brick row house, one of five. All were similar with little fences and gardens in the front, and a large garden in the rear. We sat and talked for three hours, Morris recalls. Eileen always had a cigarette dangling from her lips and her hair looked unwashed and she was shabbily dressed. Clive was a well-built, small man with a beard, and while he did not look like a navy man, he spoke knowledgeably on marine matters. They both smoked like chimneys and Eileen was a vegetarian. We had quiche and red wine for lunch, which was served outside in the rear garden under an apple tree. They were Bohemians. Although there was no studio in the house, I saw the tall pottery pitchers they made throughout the years for the first time, Morris says, glancing toward one now on top of a cupboard. I had never met artistic types before. Despite their appearance, I was excited by the idea of the voyage. I knew I wanted to go. Suddenly, the hum-drum life of being an engineer seemed pretty dull. A Mozart piano sonata fills the veranda air.

It is likely that he made the £35 deposit then and there. On returning to Woodbridge, Morris recalls, I felt daunted by the Stevensons but I put a good face on them for my parents because I wanted to go. Minno, my stepmother, was dubious, but Dad was gung-ho. ‘If I had the chance at your age, I’d go!’

Stevenson wrote Morris saying he could join the boat and start helping out immediately—the sooner the better. Morris packed sets of carpentry and engineering tools, and tendered his resignation. Derrick Hills tried not to look green with envy, Morris says. Poor chap! But to sail around the world was no big dream of mine, Morris goes on impatiently, bringing his eyes in from the horizon. After seeing the ad, I thought I could do it in two years.

It was a long day’s drive, Morris recalls, across England, to Appledore, in Devon, where the boat was. The boat that would take him around the world!

The boat that would take him around the world lay sitting in the mud, a wooden vessel propped up against a stone pier. It was dismal. Weird people were hanging about. The boat had been laid up, after a career in the home trade—coastal trading. No sails were on her. The decks were covered with sacks to prevent them from drying up and were all black. She looked derelict. It was disheartening to see the boat we were going to turn into our floating home.

In a way it was remarkable that she was there at all. The Enid was an 80-foot, 90-ton, wooden ketch built in 1895 as a coastal cargo boat. Hundreds, if not thousands, like her had foundered, been wrecked, or broken up before the war, in the twilight of England’s coastal trading days for merchant sailing vessels. Those that survived were laid up and abandoned; money was unavailable to make the repairs necessary for passing the surveys that would allow them to stay in business, if business could be found. The trading ketches were lying about everywhere, Morris recalls. Across the river in Bideford there was a row of them. Clive actually got one of the best. He told me an old-timer, perhaps a former mate on the boat, who lived nearby, kept the burlap bags that covered the decks wet.

What displaced them? Each ketch could carry thirty or forty times as much as a single wagon much more quickly. They could compete with railways in quite a wide field, wrote W. J. Slade in Westcountry Coasting Ketches. But in the twentieth century the centralization and the increasing scale of industry told heavily against them, and after the First World War they rapidly succumbed to changed social and economic conditions and the competition of increasingly efficient road transport. In a word, trucks. Equivalent to these merchant ketches in England were the cargo schooners that sailed along America’s east and west coasts hauling lumber, granite, and ice among hundreds of other things. None of the ketches was built after 1913 and by the Second World War the old boats were available for a song—a song and a dream.

The Enid had a bluff bow and a stubby bowsprit, and a bit of a counter stern. Word was that the wood used in her had been leftover from the lot used to build a steam yacht for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Morris recalls, savoring the idea of a dreamboat built with discards. She was oak-framed and planked with 2.5-inch thick oak. Inboard, she had ceilings made of 2-inch pine planks. The ceiling was solid, deck to bilge, because the main hold was for bulk cargo such as coal or wheat. Ketch-rigged, she was bald-headed with a tall main pole mast and a shorter mizzen pole mast.

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The Enid, Falmouth, England, on the eve of her departure, 1951.

Photo by Morris Nicholson

A deckhouse stood over the engine room and cabin aft. The binnacle was screwed to the deck over the after cabin, in front of the wheel. Chain ran from the rudder head, through round chain sheaves port and starboard, and thence to a shaft behind the wheel, around which it wrapped. It was crude, blacksmith-type steering gear, Morris says. All the winches on deck were of similar vintage. Forward of the deckhouse was the mizzen mast, and forward of that, yawning all the way to the main mast, was the great hold, wide as the ship and as deep. It was filled then only with air and a ballast of granite blocks; but Morris found a handful of grain in a 2-inch gap between the ceiling and deck.

A wide hatch with raised coaming allowed the cargo to be moved in or out. It was secured in the traditional way, with heavy planks covered by a tarpaulin battened down on the coaming sides. Ahead of the hold and the main mast was a small fo’c’s’le, which was turned into living quarters for the crew, with eight bunks, a galley, wash basin, and head. A dining table was built around the mast and nearby was a cast-iron, paraffin stove.

For power other than its mizzen, gaff-main, topsail, staysail, and jib, the ketch had a 30-horsepower 2-cylinder, 2-stroke Widdop semi-diesel. This was the original engine fit into the boat after the First World War, made in Yorkshire. Starting it up was something else, Morris recalls, a long and tedious, dramatic chore.

The engine was a low-compression diesel, which needed two cylinder heads heated by blow lamps. Because of that, you had to get blow lamps glowing hot first and then heat the massive iron cylinder heads. This is what took time, nearly thirty minutes. You set the flywheel on its starting marks, Morris recalls. Then, when the cylinder was hot enough, you opened the main valve on the air bottle and then the starting valve on the engine itself. This latter shot a blast of air into the engine. With luck, the engine turned over. Then, with the engine going, you had to pump up the cylinder bottle of air. This, Morris explains, resignation in his reedy voice, was a common arrangement found in boats for many years.

The Widdop pushed the boat along at about 5 knots on a calm sea; it was of little use against strong currents or in a heavy sea—not that you could have started it in a heavy sea. It also required kerosene for the blowlamps, which was expensive and therefore in short supply. It is useful to remember that the Enid had been, first and foremost, a commercial sailing vessel run economically—that is, moved principally and whenever possible by wind and tide.

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When Morris stepped aboard that spring day, a few of the other crew had already arrived, among them the designated engineer. His first name was Peter but he left after a short while, before his last name could become an entry in the ship’s log. Others, too, on seeing the boat, left the same day they arrived, forfeiting their deposit. Clive made an additional one thousand pounds from the forfeited deposits! Morris chuckles.

Making money off of other people’s disappointment was not the only thing Clive did to move his own plans forward. Clive was a schemer. He wrote several companies to get what today we call sponsorship. Surprisingly, he got three sponsors, Morris remembers distinctly. In payment, the companies mostly wanted reports written back and their product talked about.

One was Ovaltine, the chocolate malt mix added to milk. It came as a powder in tins, and also in tablets and biscuit form—cartons and cartons of the stuff. The biscuits were quite tasty and went fast. We used to suck the tablets on watch. We still had tablets left when we reached Martinique, Morris recalls.

The second sponsor was Robbialac Paint. The company sent a case of twenty gallons of white enamel, which they used to paint the living quarters, plus cases of rust primer, a gray paint for metal fittings, black for the topsides, and red for the decks. The black deck was painted red, Morris says, in the tradition started by Lord Nelson who famously held that a deck should be the color of blood. (The bottom was red with antifouling paint, the caprail was white.) The company supplied a placard, which the crew screwed onto the coaming of the engine room. This boat is painted with Robbialac, it read, and gave the company’s address. The multicolored sign was made of a sheet of asbestos roofing, a good material but fragile. Eventually, it suffered an accident. Something was swung against it—possibly a refrigerator—and it cracked. Pieces of the sign hung on screws. We were very glad to get this freeness, however, Morris says.

The third sponsor was Oldham’s Limited, a battery company. The boat came with oil lamps only. There was a locker forward, full of them and kerosene. I converted these lamps to electric and wired the ketch below decks, Morris recalls. Stevenson had obtained a generator, a two-stroke, high-speed Johnson, which ran on gas and was quite powerful, but Morris exchanged it for another, a four-stroke JAP (J. A. Prestwich) generator, with which he had some familiarity. Still, the missing link in the electrical chain was batteries. Oldham’s came through magnificently with four large ones in teak cases, Morris marvels. The four, each 6-volts, made a 24-volt set, and provided 150-200 amp hours—the same used by London buses.

The generator and batteries were in the engine room and provided modest electricity throughout the ship. Morris himself wrote letters to Oldham’s saying the batteries were fine. The system, however, was nothing fancy. Its components were the generator, batteries, and light bulbs—there was no voltage regulator. It was basic, Morris says. And as time went on it got even more basic.

The old coastal cargo boat was transformed into an ocean-going yacht and outfitted mainly in Appledore and finally in Falmouth, Cornwall, with a passage in-between. There were ten in the crew of the Enid when she departed Falmouth; of these, only six were paying principals.

Clive Stevenson, thirty-four, was captain. He had been in the British merchant marine, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six roughly, and had then gone to the Slade Art School. Morris figures he met Eileen there. They lived the next seven or eight years in Chelsea, apparently doing art of one sort or another. They claimed to know the painter Augustus John. They were Bohemians, Morris repeats with modest astonishment, as if he had met gorillas in the mist. Eileen was twenty-three. He strokes the cat on his lap, and the trade wind sighs.

The first mate and oldest crew member was Henry Britton. Sixty-two, he was a good navigator and an ex-banker with a modest pension. Hamish Barr, thirty-two or thirty-three, was second mate. A Scot from the Isle of Eriska, on Scotland’s west coast, he had built a 12-foot sail boat, a Yachting World Cadet, which was used by the crew for recreation. His brother, Alistair Barr, thirty, was third mate. Alistair was the vagabond with a sextant and no money, Morris recalls. He was a pleasant guy and could sail. The crew voted in favor of letting him come along. Morris had become the ship’s engineer and Leader Ben Hawkins, thirty, was ship’s carpenter.

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Lunch on the Enid. Falmouth, England, 1951. Left–right: Ben Hawkins, Morris Nicholson, Alistair Barr, and Meryl C. Welsh sitting on deck beside the main halyard winch drums. A decorated clay pitcher made by the Stevensons stands beside Alistair.

Photo by Ronald Startup, Picture Post

The lone paying woman in the crew was Meryl C. Welch. In her mid thirties, she was in charge of food. Morris, not without fondness, says Meryl was looking for a husband. "She came aboard with a fur coat and jewelry box. She was from a wealthy family and had worked as a freelance journalist, publishing in the Yorkshire Post. For awhile, he remembers, the two ladies got the after cabin. But they didn’t get along, and Clive and Eileen, who had a long happy marriage, were glad enough to get the cabin back to themselves. Meryl shifted for herself in the fo’c’s’le with the rest of us."

Tony Bell, twenty-two, the sixth paying crewmember, was a useless character, Morris recalls. Just hopeless, all thumbs. He could never learn to tie knots. He was a painter who also wrote. He was scribbling much of the time.

The tenth crewmember was an elderly man named Fred Barker whose business was making marquees. Fred wanted only to make the initial sea passage to Lisbon. He paid for the passage with a bolt of No. 14 cotton canvas.

Most of the crewmembers cooked one day a week and Morris’s day was Thursday, he recalls. Coffee was in low supply and he would dilute what they had with cocoa. Whether to heat water or cook, all they had was a two-burner paraffin stove. Tony Bell couldn’t cook any better than he could tie knots, Morris says. He could not cook even pasta, which he once served hot but hard as bits of rock; but he took his turn.

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Enid left Falmouth, England, in June of 1951. For tenders the ketch had the small, plywood sailboat built by Hamish; an early fiberglass pram that was a freeness and much-used as a dinghy; and lastly a huge lifeboat that was kept on the main hatch and was a real chore to launch and row—it took two to row. In Falmouth, Morris says, the lifeboat was used to collect various bo’s’n’s stores that Clive had liberated from a freighter in harbor. Ben and I were in the lifeboat lying alongside, receiving stuff being lowered down twenty feet on a line from Clive on deck. A five-gallon pail of white paint was being lowered when, just before reaching our upstretched hands, it began to spin. Paint sprayed over the edge in a white shower and drenched us, Morris says, chuckling. The can had no lid.

Morris, with the trade wind blowing back strands of his thin hair, continues. Our departure was, in fact, delayed by the business of scrounging stuff from one of the BYMS class of American mine sweepers laid up nearby. It was a common thing to do in post-war England when things were scarce, he explains, scrounging, and Clive and Alistair were especially keen on it. We scrounged all sorts of things from the engine room and the bo’s’n’s locker. But it wasn’t legal and the night watchman caught us and summoned the police. After appearing in court the next day, Clive was told by the magistrate to put to sea within twenty-four hours, which I initially thought accounted for our leaving without proper charts.

The refurbished ketch, heavily laden with supplies and feeling new life in her old bones, pulled out of Falmouth, headed southeast. Morris was twenty-three years old. Working as a draftsman was boring, he says, the tree frogs in the Hill House garden starting up in earnest. I was in the electrical division of a big engineering firm, ‘R&R’—Ransomes and Rapier. I was waiting for senior members to retire in order to get promoted. He had sold his motorcycle and other things, and had taken out all his savings to raise the three hundred fifty pounds.

Morris turns a glass in his large, gnarled hands. England was boring, he says flatly. It was a sentiment held by many after the Second World War, and one that he would hear often in the course of his adventures in the trade wind.

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The sails of the Enid were neither new nor uniform. When the crew, headed for Gibraltar, raised them, the mizzen was Bermudian, made of heavy white canvas; the gaff mainsail was flax (linen); and the two forward sails, a staysail and a jib, were cutched. That is, Morris explains, the white canvas, subject to mildew, mold, and rot, was treated with a preservative called cutch. In the treatment, the preservative turned the sail a rusty-red color. English yachts, especially, were famous for their cutched sails. A highly regarded book written by fellow Englishman Peter Pye about a similar undertaking around this time was titled Red Mains’l.

The passage southeast to Gibraltar was a hectic trip. Morris knew he was subject to seasickness. He had gotten sick on the boat going from Appledore to Falmouth, and he was sick again while crossing the Bay of Biscay; but he was soon well. This became the pattern for all his sea-going days. If he was ashore for longer than a week, he would get sick on going to sea and then feel fine. Morris saw early on what chronic seasickness was. The man who had signed on as the original engineer and paid the whole fee of three hundred fifty pounds for the voyage got so sick on that first passage from Appledore, that he walked off the boat forever in Falmouth, telling Stevenson to keep the deposit!

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By the time the Enid put into Vigo, Spain, their first foreign port, Morris was already worried about the circumnavigation. He had realized, slowly, there was no money left in the ship’s kitty, which was the real reason they had no charts. The money had been spent on rum, gin, lots of cigarettes, but not on charts. In fact they had crossed the Bay of Biscay using a Philips Atlas. In Vigo, to see their way down to the Med, Hamish bought two coasting charts with his own money.

In Lisbon, their next port, Morris and Ben talked about their situation while sightseeing. The view from Castillo de San Jorge, an old fortified tower looking south and west over the Tagus River, was fabulous; but it clouded somewhat when Ben told Morris that Clive had said he purchased the Enid precisely because, with its cargo hold, he could stop anywhere in the world and work to make money. Also, Meryl had moved out of the aft cabin and into the fo’c’s’le by then, and with Clive and Eileen now together in a private cabin, the crew felt separate from the couple and their scheming. The arrangement created a barrier. We never knew what was going on, Morris says.

From Lisbon they sailed south through the Strait of Gibraltar and into Algeciras, where the Enid was anchored out in the harbor. Morris and Ben went ashore with their cameras and while sightseeing in the countryside found themselves in a cork forest. The cork oak is a small tree whose bark is cork. The bark is stripped into sections about two inches thick, and wine bottle corks are punched out of it. What do they say? Morris asks, looking out over the sparkling Caribbean sea. Wine is a trinity: the bottle is the skeleton, the wine is the blood, and the cork is the lung. Algeciras itself was dry and dusty, with narrow streets, and they were glad to get back to the ketch in the harbor.

There, over tea, Stevenson announced they were broke. Most of the money had been spent in buying and outfitting the ship, he told the crew. We were all furious, Morris says, not that we didn’t suspect it. But we all were mad as hell when we learned, further, that the boat had been registered in his name only—we had assumed it was in the name of all the shareholders. Clive had used our money to buy the boat, and the boat was in his name! Stevenson, not a man to let principle stand in his way, proposed that they smuggle to earn money and had the ship registered as a commercial vessel in Gibraltar. It had been registered as a yacht in England because a yacht, unlike a commercial boat, did not have to pay certain port fees around the world.

The circumnavigators sailed south then to Morocco, where they sat on Smuggler’s Row inside Tangier’s great sea wall for two months waiting for cargo. In Tangier, an international zone and duty-free port, the government was tripartite—British, French, and Spanish. Because the French were in neighboring Algeria, they had a dominating presence but when Morris was there, the destroyers were British. Moroccans wanted independence from the various protectorates that divided the territory and rioting was not infrequent in the native quarter, as the Casbah was then called.

Morris shows me a picture, taken by Ben, of himself in the foreground, local fishing boats active in the smuggling trade behind him, and behind them the white buildings on a rounded hill that was the native quarter. He points to the masts to the right of his shoulder. "Enid’s," he says. The muffled roar of the surf below us at Hill House rises to us like the sound of memory.

The Enid’s first cargo consisted of one thousand cases of cigarettes, eight refrigerators, and small items that included lipstick, razor blades, and ballpoint pens. Each case of cigarettes had fifty cartons, each with two hundred cigarettes. They were nearly always Chesterfields, Morris recalls. With the cargo came the supercargo, a man who sailed with them on behalf of the shipping agent to ensure that the boat didn’t sail off with the goods and see they reached the right hands. As soon as the supercargo came aboard he ripped open one of the boxes of cigarettes and handed cartons to each crewmember for free. In this way he guarded against pilfering. I never smoked but I would take them and put them under my bunk, to barter with later, Morris says.

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Morris Nicholson on Smuggler’s Row, Tangiers, Morocco, 1951.

Photo by Ben Hawkins

They sailed some eight hundred miles from Tangier out to the Spanish-governed Canary Islands shortly before Christmas, 1951. A shipping agent in Tangier named Homrani had arranged everything, Morris explains. Homrani, a Moroccan Arab who dressed in a djellaba, a hooded robe, was a reputable agent in a long-established family business; smuggling was a sideline.

But how did it work? I ask, looking again at the print. The appearance of the man before me is remarkably like that of the figure in the photo fifty years ago. His features are somewhat more pronounced now, and his skin is weathered as only skin exposed to the sea glare can be. He is thin, not tall, but solid as a stainless-steel stay, with veins that resemble the wire strands. His hair is no longer reddish-brown and thinning, but his eyes remain bright and blue, inset above a sharply angled beak of a nose and flanked by large, long ears. His teeth are crooked, in the neglected manner typical of his countrymen. His smile is wide and quick and surprising, for his countenance is normally concentrated, intent. "What is this?" he says in a rising anapest, pulling his head back and smiling when he considers something—even his own photograph.

The boat sailed out of Tangier with proper papers for Liberia. It was all perfectly legal—except that the boat never went to Liberia, Morris explains. After sailing south off the African coast, they headed southwest from Agadir and passed into the channel between Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. They waited in the channel until they could arrive off Las Palmas at midnight. After the five-day trip, the supercargo would signal people ashore with a flashlight. Men came out in large rowboats and rowed back and forth, back and forth, taking the contraband ashore.

By then Enid’s crew had sorted itself out. The marquee maker had left the boat in Lisbon, and Alistair Barr left in Tangier. Meryl was the magnet for a group including Morris, Ben, and Hamish, whom she eventually married. The Enid had been late in reaching Falmouth, where Meryl and Hamish waited to join the ship. It was then that they had struck up a relationship, Morris figures. In Tangier, while they were living in the squalor of Smuggler’s Row, Meryl would take the group for high tea at a fancy French hotel in the city’s modern European section. She would also buy Arab bread for the boat on the way back since, without an oven, they could not bake their own. Meryl was always elegant, even in a bathing suit, Morris says approvingly, but she had a sharp tongue. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Meryl. She and Eileen were like chalk and cheese. Eileen spoke like a fish wife but could not retort sharply like Meryl. Eileen was not a person to get on the wrong side of, either.

Morris had a letter of introduction to Lord Creighton-Stuart, a British expatriate living in the native quarter. It came from Aunt Toby, the younger sister of Minno, his stepmother. However, living on Smuggler’s Row, he didn’t use it. It would have been like being a black sheep on his doorstep, Morris says. He never showed it to the others in the Enid, and certainly not to Meryl, fearing they would make him use it.

The economics of smuggling?

The agent bought a case for $40 U.S. and sold it in the Canaries for $50, Morris explains. The math is simple: 1,000 cases x $10 profit = $10,000. Homrani turned over the boat’s share to Clive. We never knew how much this was—perhaps $2,000? That was a lot of money to us.

In all, the Enid made three trips to the Canaries. On the first two, space being premium, those who had the private means to stay behind did so. This meant Meryl, Hamish, and Henry. It was then, after a couple of months of living together in a hotel, that Hamish bought Meryl an engagement ring; their announcement was made on Tenerife. Only after the Enid’s third run, with the whole crew aboard, did they sail around to Santa Cruz de Tenerife harbor after unloading the contraband, hoist the Q flag, and go ashore to enter the country properly. Oh yeah, the agent told the crew, "we saw you