Racundra’s First Cruise

Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.

It is for that reason, perhaps, that, when it comes, the desire to build a boat is one of those that cannot be resisted. It begins as a little cloud on a serene horizon. It ends by covering the whole sky, so that you can think of nothing else. You must build to regain your freedom. And always you comfort yourself with the thought that yours will be the perfect boat, the boat that you may search the harbours of the world for and not find.

That is the story of Racundra. Years of planning went into her before ever a line was drawn on paper. She was to be a cruising boat that one man could manage if need be, but on which three could live comfortably. She was to have writing-table and bookcase, a place for a typewriter, broad bunks where a man might lay him down and rest without braising knee and elbow with each unconsidered movement. She was to carry her dinghy on deck to avoid that troublesome business of towing, which has brought so many good dinghies to their latter end.

Then began a wild but, in a curious way, rather enjoyable night. No misfortunes at sea are enjoyable in themselves. He is a liar who says they are and he is a fool who courts them. But when misfortune has come against your will, when it is there, when you have shaken hands with it, realized it thoroughly, and done what you think is the best possible thing to do, there comes a sort of release from further worry which is quite sensibly pleasant.

There was Racundra with her mainsail gone, proved incapable of beating under staysail and mizzen, rigged as they then were in a temporary manner, careering through steep seas in a pitch-dark night with no sidelights and a binnacle lamp that would not burn. On the face of it, misery. Yet there was no misery about it. While in that narrow bay I had been much afraid, but here, in the open sea, things were better. Besides, we were doing the thing which I had myself urged as the right thing to do. It was my own thing, this careering business out here in the dark, and I had the joy of possession. I was still afraid, of course, but knew where I was, and knew what I had to avoid. I had to prevent Racundra from being blown too far out to sea, to prevent her from working sideways to Nargon island, and to make headway if possible towards the shallow bay on

We had anchored half a mile from the shore off the place that is called Ermuiste, which means “the terrible,” for it is a place of many wrecks, a rocky point open to the widest sweep of the winds across the Baltic Sea. We had not dared to go nearer, and I was glad we had not, for, as I rowed ashore in the little boat, I passed many rocks awash and saw others a foot or two under water. There were dark purple clouds rising over the sea to the N.W., wind was coming, and we were impatient to be off again, to find shelter, or at least to put some miles of sea between us and that notorious coast. But there was still sunlight on the rocky shore and on the dark pinewoods that ran down almost to the water’s edge and on the little wooden pierhead, unmarked on the chart, which, seen through binoculars, had tempted us to run in and look for information and supplies. Beyond the pierhead was a little stretch of beach where I meant to land. But, looking over my shoulder as I pulled in, bobbing over the waves in my little boat, I could see none of the things that a pierhead usually promises. There was no watchman’s hut on the pier, no smoke above the trees, no cottages, no loafers, no fishermen, no sign of any kind of life. And then, coming nearer, I saw that the pier was in ruins. Much of its planking had gone, great beams were leaning perilously over from it, and here and there masses of it had actually fallen into the water.

I have seen many cabins, but none quite like that hutch in which the captain of the Toledo had his comfortable being. It was built of baulks of wood set up on end between the iron decks. It was six feet six inches high, long and broad. That size, Captain Konga explained, he had found by experiment to be the most convenient. Sitting on his bunk, he could put wood on the stove in the corner, light his reading-lamp, take a book from the opposite shelf, eggs or bacon from his store-cupboard, reach down his saucepan or frying-pan from the hooks on the wall, or get the boatswain’s whistle, with piercing blasts of which he summoned the members of his crew. From any place in it he could reach every other place, and that, he said, was the most labour saving kind of house.

He told me the story of the ship. She had been captured by the Germans in the summer of 1918. She had been aground on the shallows close by Heltermaa, but one wild night, while the Germans had all been drinking ashore, a strong westerly wind had so raised the waters in the Gulf that the Toledo floated off, and when the Germans came to look for her in the morning, she had floated far out to sea, and by miraculous chance had settled herself on this small shoal by the Erik Stone. The water had fallen again, and the Germans had lost the war and left these parts before it had ever again risen high enough to let them get her off.