Amazing Sailing Stories: True Adventures from the High Seas

By Dick Durham

Set sail on a thrilling journey to discover some of the most exciting tales of adventure afloat. There's every sort of vessel from majestic square rigger to humble homemade yacht. Journey around gale-whipped headlands and survive mountainous seas – or turn the page to discover the delights of cruising among the islands of a tropical paradise. The exploits of sailing's greatest names are recounted, along with an eclectic mix of tales that never made the headlines, yet make compelling reading. Discover a treasure trove of sailing stories from across centuries, and from the four corners of the globe. This is wonderful reading for anyone with a love of sailing and the sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fernhurst Books Limited
• Release date: Aug 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781119952626

Dick Durham

In his childhood Dick Durham explored the creeks and rivers of Essex, Kent and Suffolk in a collection of dinghies and dayboats. When he left school he signed on as mate of the Thames sailing barge Cambria, and served on the last working Thames barge before beginning his writing career on Fleet Street, writing for national newspapers and sailing magazines. He joined Yachting Monthly in 1998 as a feature writer and news editor and has travelled the globe in search of the best sailing stories and adventures. He is well known for his powerful and poetic writing style.

Book preview

PART ONE

Survival

VOYAGE OF DESPERATION

With no sailing or navigation experience John Caldwell set out from Panama on a 9 500-mile voyage to get back to his wife in Australia. His voyage included shark attack, starvation and shipwreck

The lack of shipping, at the end of World War II, prompted lovesick John Caldwell to embark on one of the most foolhardy voyages in the annals of sailing history because he was pining for his newly-wed wife Mary. They had married in 1945, but she was back in Sydney, Australia and the boatless Caldwell had come ashore at Balboa, Panama in May 1946 after working as a merchant seaman aboard a US Liberty ship distributing Australian troops to Borneo.

So the 27-year-old Texan bought Pagan, a 29 ft cutter which had 1 000 pounds of cement poured into her bilge to help the 600-pound lead shoe nailed onto the keel keep her 40 ft mast upright. She would not have been everyone's choice of craft in which to cross the Pacific Ocean.

With no experience of sailing or navigation other than that which he had managed to glean from a basic book: How To Sail, Caldwell set off with two cats, Flotsam and Jetsam for company and 248 tins of food and 95 gallons of water. With the engine running and the helm lashed he walked forward to stow the anchor and cable, but while carrying the anchor he tripped and plunged overboard and went down with the hook until he let go and fought his way to the surface. Here he found his little ship driving round and round the dragging anchor. Pagan hit a buoy, as Caldwell swam towards her, but as she took a run at him he managed to scramble up her low freeboard by way of the chain plates. Now with the engine still running and the anchor still dragging he decided to have a go at sailing! After an uncontrolled gybe, he managed to retrieve his anchor and chain, then dropped the sails and motored out to sea. With just 9 500 miles to go before Australia, the solo sailor decided he better get in some practice, but out of sight of the longshoremen of Balboa. Instead Caldwell managed to con the boat to the Perlas Islands on the south-eastern side of the Gulf of Panama and here spent eight days practising. During a gale he managed to hit an uprooted floating tree which sprung some planks. Pagan was beached before she sank and Caldwell repaired her and set sail once more for the Galapagos Islands.

About halfway to the Galapagos he decided to have a go at shark fishing: hoping to show off a shark's jaw to Mary. Amazingly and with the use of a halyard he fished and landed a large shark weighing several hundred pounds. He tried killing it with an axe, but this brought the beast back to life and with a flick of its tail snapped off Pagan’s tiller and flipped it over the side. By the time Caldwell had despatched it the shark had half-demolished the cockpit and wrecked the engine.

In the Galapagos he stopped to clean Pagan’s hull of weed and barnacles and set off from Floreana for his next destination, the Marquesas 3 000 miles away.

Although he saw Nuku Hiva, the main island and port of clearance for the Marquesas, Caldwell was anxious to push on and try to beat the hurricane season, and so, even after 29 days he did not stop. Instead he called in, briefly, at the Caroline Islands for coconuts to eke out his dwindling supplies. Here he gave away his two cats to some admiring children.

Six days out of the Carolines the weather started to deteriorate. Caldwell feared the worst as squalls started building, the sky got darker and rain drenched the little boat. A full-blown hurricane was about to take over his life. Caldwell stowed his anchor below, put his inflatable dinghy on a painter astern, and lashed everything down including himself to his bunk. There he lay worrying whether Pagan’s 26-year-old timbers would hold together.

For three days he lay like this as the storm raged about him, ripping out the mast, filling the boat with water and making a quagmire of the tools, food and clothing below.

After it was over Caldwell used the broken spars to make a jury rig and under much reduced canvas carried on, at approximately one knot, hoping to limp into Samoa.

Food ran low and then out. He fried a fish in Vaseline, ate toothpaste, face cream, a stub of lipstick he'd been saving for Mary and ‘fried’ some chamois leather in shaving cream and engine oil. Then he cut an oar into a spear and managed to catch some fish. But Pagan’s progress was pitifully slow and he next cut up his leather army boots, ‘tenderised’ them by beating them on the end of his bunk, soaked them in salt water, then fried them in hair oil before boiling them in strips. He even scraped the seaweed off Pagan’s stricken hull, ‘dressed’ it with hair oil and swallowed that, too.

At last a breeze came and he was able to shape a course. After 36 days under jury rig, weak from starvation and lack of water and with no compass or other navigation equipment – they'd been lost or smashed in the hurricane – he ran Pagan up on a coral reef off the island of Tuvutha in the Lau Group of the Fiji Islands.

Caldwell eventually managed to stagger ashore across the reef to a beach where he lay exhausted with bits of wreckage from Pagan for company.

After three days he was rescued by locals who could only get to him by sea as the cliffs to the hinterland were inaccessible.

He was taken off by a schooner which visited the islands every four months to load copra: she had visited the island just a couple of weeks before so Caldwell went native while waiting. His hosts nursed him back to health.

Eventually, via New Caledonia he flew to Brisbane and finally arrived in Sydney where he was reunited with his wife for the first time in 19 months.

THREE MONTHS ADRIFT IN A RUBBER DINGHY

A middle-class couple's blue-water dream of sailing round the world turned into a nightmare when their boat was sunk by a whale and they spent 118 days clinging to life and hoping for rescue

They were an ordinary couple: he a printer's clerk, she a tax officer, and both lived miles from the sea. But Maurice and Maralyn Bailey had a dream: to sail across the Pacific Ocean in their own boat. The only way they could afford to do this was to sell their house in Derby. With the proceeds they bought a Maurice Griffiths-designed bilge keeler, a 31 ft Golden Hind. She was built in Plymouth and characteristically christened with the union of their own names, Auralyn. They taught themselves how to sail and navigate from books and in June 1972 they sailed from the River Hamble, in Hampshire via the Canaries, to Barbados, Antigua and the Panama Canal before entering the Pacific.

In the early hours of their sixth day out from Panama and steering for the Galapagos Islands they spotted the lights of a whaling ship and steered clear of her after she trained a searchlight on Auralyn to warn them away.

Just as the sun was rising their plywood boat was hit by a sperm whale – which naturalist Sir Peter Scott later speculated might have seen Auralyn as a source of food – so heavily that Maralyn watched in horror as the creature thrashed around astern of them in a sea of blood.

Water soon started rising through the boat's cabin and to Maurice's horror he discovered a splintered hole 18 ins × 12 ins on the port side. They tried draping a spare sail around the gash and stuffing it with blankets on the inside. But 40 minutes later the boat was settling and they inflated their life-raft tossing jerry cans of water, stores, charts, navigation equipment and food into the inflatable dinghy. From their rubber convoy they took pictures of their new home sinking beneath the waves as a perfect morning established itself.

They lived on the life-raft and used the inflatable dinghy for stores. Maurice rowed the dinghy, towing the life-raft, due south, hoping to make good a course of south-west which would put them among the Galapagos archipelago, but the current and prevailing winds were both from the south-east and they were set 150 miles north of the islands after 22 days.

In this time they spotted a ship, but a malfunctioning flare meant its crew failed to see them. They killed a turtle, and butchered it for food. And they made fish-hooks out of safety pins, using a pair of scissors to fillet the fish they caught. Both forced themselves to eat raw fish and they collected rain water in a bucket from the life-raft's canopy.

Three more ships appeared but steamed on. The last one coming within half a mile but still not seeing the ‘bonfire’ Maurice had lit in a biscuit tin or the waving of orange oilskins by Maralyn. A fifth ship also failed to spot their, by now, home-made flares of rag and paraffin. And then a small disaster struck when Maurice, while trying to catch a milk fish, punctured the life-raft with his hook. They patched it up but found to their dismay that the life-raft required pumping with air twice a day. Then they discovered that a spinefoot fish, hovering in the shade beneath the raft had also punctured it. They tried unsuccessfully to repair the holes and now noticed the tape joining the two circular tubes of the life-raft had perished in the relentless sun. After the seventh ship passed without seeing them they spent the next six weeks entirely alone on the ocean.

Then, on their 93rd day adrift during a storm, a large wave capsized the inflatable while Maurice was in it baiting hooks for turtle-fishing. He surfaced alongside the upside down dinghy. Maurice managed to scramble into the life-raft and they righted the dinghy but they had lost all their bait and fishing gear. After bouts of diarrhoea they decided on a change of diet and caught and strangled booby birds. But the fish was much too tasty to ignore and after fashioning more fish hooks from safety pins they caught dorados, wolf herring and small sharks. A second storm lasted four days and capsized the inflatable again leaving them just one fish hook and Maurice tried using his navigational dividers opened out as a spear.

On 30 June after 118 days adrift and 43 days after seeing their last ship they were spotted by a Korean tuna fishing boat, Weolmi 306. They were given fresh clothes, food and medical attention and dropped in Honolulu, Hawaii, thirteen days later.

The 118 days they spent adrift is still a record in the annals of survival.

THE TRUE STORY OF MOBY DICK

The classic tale of adventure and obsession on the high seas is based on an horrific real-life whaling voyage

One reason Herman Melville's classic story Moby Dick is such a wonderful book is that it's fiction based on an even stranger true story. Before writing it the author interviewed a whaling man, Owen Chase, first mate of the Nantucket whaleship Essex and was haunted by his grim yarn.

On 20 November 1820 the Essex and her 20 crew were 1 000 miles from the nearest land close to the Equator in the Pacific Ocean when they sighted a spout. It marked a pod of whales. The ship was hove-to: one set of sails set in the opposite direction to the others so the ship would stay almost in the same position. This enabled all the sailors to leave the ship and give chase to the whales in their three whaling boats which were lightly built for speed. Captain George Pollock was in charge of one boat, Owen Chase another and the second mate, Englishman Thomas Chappel, the third boat.

Chase was first to impale a sperm whale with his harpoon but the wounded giant thrashed the water with its tail and smashed the planking of his boat. Chase cut the harpoon line with his hatchet and he and his crew baled the leaking boat as they rowed her back to the Essex. They hauled the splintered boat on deck and while some started to make repairs others reset the sails of the mother ship and headed towards the other two whale boats.

Suddenly an 85 ft sperm whale broke water 110 yards off the Essex’s bow and swam towards the ship at an estimated three knots – the same speed as the square rigger.

‘The ship brought up suddenly and violently as if she had struck a rock,’ Chase wrote and added that having rubbed his back on the keel of the ship the whale came up on the leeward side and lay on the surface ‘apparently stunned with the violence of the blow.’ But the whale quickly recovered and ‘He was enveloped in the foam of the sea, that his continual and violent thrashing about in the water had created around him, and I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together as if distracted with rage and fury.’

The Essex began to list, the crew manned the pumps and used flags to signal the other boats but the whale was coming back for a second attack.

‘I saw him about 100 yards directly ahead of us, coming down apparently with twice his ordinary speed; and to me, at that moment, it appeared in tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect,’ Chase added. The combined speed of the whale and ship resulted in a nine knot impact.

As Chase and his men pumped and gathered stores together, Captain Pollock and second mate Chappel were horrified to notice the ship had disappeared: she had listed over so far that her masts were below the horizon. They rowed furiously for miles on a compass course back towards the Essex before they sighted her.

Once back aboard Pollock ordered the rigging of the masts to be cut so they could be toppled over the side and help the ship right herself. It gave them a little more time to make sails from spare canvas for the three whaling boats and load them with 65 gallons of water each, plus bread, biscuit and turtles. Two compasses and three quadrants were loaded for navigation and for two nights they hung by the slowly sinking Essex moored to her stern.

On 22 November they abandoned the Essex and set sail for the coast of South America.

After battling high seas for 28 days the three boats spotted land on 20 December: an uninhabited island on which they managed to live off fish, and slaughtered birds. However, apart from a fickle stream which appeared in shoreline rocks at low tide there was no fresh water.

Pollock and Chase decided to move on and try and make for Easter Island. Chappel opted for staying on the island and was joined by two other men.

Pollock and Chase loaded a flat stone as a cooking hearth in one boat and set off on 27 December now with three boats between 17 men.

The three castaways drank the blood of birds and discovered a cave containing eight skeletons: possibly from another shipwrecked crew.

But they survived until 5 April when a gunshot announced the arrival of the ship Surrey, which took them to Valparaiso where they learned what had happened to their shipmates.

By 8 February having survived storms, shark attack and being split up in heavy weather, three of the crew had died from their ordeal. The third man was Isaac Cole and the now starving men on Chase's boat cut up his corpse and ate parts of it in desperation.

On 18 February Chase and his crew were picked up by the brig India commanded by Captain William Crozier of London. They, too, were taken to Valparaiso.

Captain Pollock and one surviving crewman, veteran whaler George Ramsdale, were also picked up, half-starved, by the American whaler Dauphin.

One boat and her crew completely disappeared.

Only eight of the original 20 survived and it was many years before Captain Pollock could bring himself to write his own account. Hardly surprising as he revealed that four men who died were eaten by the others at which point Captain Pollock loaded his pistol and laid it on a thwart of the boat. As their hunger returned the surviving men drew lots as to who would be sacrificed for the next meal. It was the cabin boy Owen Coffin who drew the short straw. Pollock said: ‘My lad if you don't like your lot, I'll shoot the first man that touches you.’ But the boy replied: ‘I like it as well as any other,’ and laid his head on the seat. Captain Pollock then gave his last order of the ill-fated cruise. Ramsdale obeyed and shot the lad through the head.

PSYCHOPATHS IN THE FO’C’SLE

Despised as useless steamboatmen and having suffered bullying and abuse from the rest of the crew, two Filipino sailors started a murder spree which ended in the loss of their ship

The forward cabin of a sailing ship, the fo’c’sle, was where the ordinary seamen slept. It was a rough and ready billet where sailors learned to live with one another rubbing along together and making the best of shared accommodation. It was no place for over-sensitive souls, law and order was imposed by cuffs and curses, but it was a great leveller and crews soon found their own place in an unspoken hierarchy. Any weakness in the daily duties of sailing the ship was revealed immediately and not tolerated.

The fo’c’sle of the New York-bound full rigged ship Frank N Thayer, when she sailed from Manila in the first week of November 1885 with a cargo of hemp, was a melting pot of different nationalities which included two Filipino seamen. They were steamboatmen who knew nothing about sailing, but who were taken on by Captain Robert Clarke, obliged to make up a crew of 22 hands for the voyage.

Their ignorance of sail was exposed as soon as the ship left port: they did not know the names of the vessel's sails or of the running and standing rigging which made giving commands tedious. Their slight build added little extra weight on the end of a rope, and one European sailor dubbed the pair ‘one bloomin’ rat power’. They could not steer by the wind and so with one in the port watch and the other in starboard watch they were used by the officers of both for menial tasks only.

They became ‘fo’c’sle peggys’ the general dogsbodies of the rest of the hands, obliged to fetch and carry for their shipmates.

A well built German sailor forced one of the ‘coolies’, as unskilled Oriental labourers were then derogatorily called, to swap berths as his suffered from a deck leak. While transferring his gear the Filipino sailor cursed him under his breath in his native tongue. When the German demanded to know what he had said and was told he had been described as a ‘square-head’ he beat him up.

A few days later his fellow Filipino let the ship run off course and was told by the second mate, Davis, never to come aft to the wheel again. ‘All you're fit for is scouring out the hencoop and pigsty,’ Davis had said. At which the Asian pulled out a knife. Davis then said: ‘If I ever see your knife come out again I'll rub your black face in the deck. Savvy?’

No-one except the Chinese cook, Ah Say, took any notice of the long scar running down the face of one of the Filipinos, and much later it was revealed the other had a criminal record.

Despite the shortcomings of her two steamboat crew, the Frank N Thayer made a good run across the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and stood northwards into the South Atlantic. She soon picked up the south-east trade winds and with her yards trimmed square, steered for the island of St Helena where Captain Clarke, who had his wife and child aboard, intended to secure fresh provisions.

On the night of 2 January 1886 the Frank N Thayer was approximately 700 miles south-east of St Helena making 10 knots under full sail. The starboard watch were having an easy time of it laying on deck on blankets enjoying the full moon and balmy air. The second mate was then approached by the two Filipinos, one of whom asked for medication as he had a ‘sick stomach’.

Davis replied that the medicine chest was in the captain's cabin and that he was not going to rouse him over a stomach ache. Both the Filipinos then pulled out their knives and fell upon him. But Davis managed to stagger along the deck and down the companionway to the captain's cabin where, after hammering on the door, he collapsed.

Captain Clarke, horrified to find his second mate's body outside his cabin door rushed on deck still dressed in his pyjamas. As he emerged from the hooded companionway he was gripped by the throat and stabbed in the shoulder. Clarke, who