Racundra’s First Cruise quotes

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.

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 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.

The hull of Racundra was right enough, and, by the time we had finished with her, we had put right the lesser matters that were wrong.

Fools build and wise men buy.

Well, I shall never build again, and in all probability shall never have money enough to buy. Nor shall I have need. For Racundra turned out to be all that I had hoped. We took her to sea in the Baltic autumn;

He was a very little man, with a white beard and a head as bald as my own. Sometimes on board he wore a crimson stocking-cap with a tassel, when he looked like a gnome, a pixy or a fairy cobbler.

If Queen Mab went to sea she could not find a fitter mariner.

The third of us was Racundra’s “master and owner,” who writes these words even now with the swelling pride that he felt when he first saw them on the ship’s papers handed to him on departure by the Lettish Customs Office.

Nothing would make him leave the ship. He never went ashore, except in Helsingfors to look for a particular size of sailmaker’s needles, unobtainable in Riga, and in smaller ports to bring water to refill our casks.

“Shore,” he would say, “I have enough of shore at home.”

He was a very little man, with a white beard and a head as bald as my own. Sometimes on board he wore a crimson stocking-cap with a tassel, when he looked like a gnome, a pixy or a fairy cobbler.

The third of us was Racundra’s “master and owner,” who writes these words even now with the swelling pride that he felt when he first saw them on the ship’s papers handed to him on departure by the Lettish Customs Office.

“Master and Owner of the Racundra.” Does any man need a prouder title or description? In moments of humiliation, those are the words that I shall whisper to myself for comfort. I ask no others on my grave.

She said that after seeing what we could do with in the way of luncheon she was afraid she had not enough provisions. We told her that there was a time-honoured rule of the sea:

“If grub runs out, eat the Cook.”

She went ashore in the dinghy with little hope, as it was Sunday, but came back with eggs, black currants, radishes, an extra hunk of cheese and some more potatoes, to find Racundra really looking more like herself, with backstays rigged, boards for the sidelights …

I suppose most readers of this book have already lost the ecstatic joy of sighting land at sea. Yet, no.

I do not believe that even for the oldest mariner that joy can ever fade. It is always new, always a miracle, never in the common ruck of absolutely predictable events.

Islands especially stir the blood, and Runö, that lonely place, over fifty miles out from Riga and nearly as far from the Estonian coast, with its Swedish seal-hunters using words that in Sweden have become archaic, living in the twentieth century a life of medieval …

The wind, now really blowing pretty hard, kept shifting, and more than once we had to jibe. We passed one spar-buoy, then another, then found the long expected light-buoy, and north of that a group of four spar-buoys and a solitary pair.

Spar-buoys are the loneliest things in the sea.

For those who do not know them I should perhaps have said before that they are tall posts anchored to the bottom of the sea to mark the shallows.

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 …

I leaned forward from the steering-well and shouted, “Why?”

“Because I have two thermos flasks full of hot coffee. If we are, we may as well drink them both. If not, I’ll keep one till tomorrow.”

We kept one. We drank the hot coffee from the other and ate a huge quantity of sandwiches. The more we ate the better things seemed. We grew accustomed even to the din.

I never once woke with sails flapping, and never once to find that I had fallen off the wind.

Racundra took care of her skipper, who was far too tired to take care of himself.

Then, suddenly, the sleeping fit passed from me and I was extraordinarily awake, most unpleasantly aware of what I took to be some martial idiot rushing about with a little ship of war showing no lights but the occasional disconcerting flash of a projector.

I suppose it is as true as many things in history that Linda, with whom Estonian chronicles begin, was born from a grouse’s egg.

She refused the sun and the moon in marriage, giving them the soundest categorical reasons for their rejection, and married instead the young giant Kalev, who, after a seven days’ wedding feast, drove off with her in his sledge and came to this wild country …

… the great stretch of the blue bay, steamers lying in the roads, white-sailed yachts, sedate schooners slipping away northward to Finland far beyond the little island of Wulf, or moving westward between Nargon and the mainland, where again is open sea and clear horizon …

I cannot believe that any man who has looked out to sea from Reval castle rock can ever be wholly happy unless he has a boat.

My imaginary wandering freemason of the sea, warmed by the thought that he has a share in all this, that he too can sail past those distant promontories, since his little ship is awaiting him in harbour, will then go down from the battlements by …

He wanted a special size of sailmaker’s needles, besides some scrubbing brushes and mops which he did not trust me to buy. He was not in the least interested in the town.

“Towns,” said he, “are all one and all dirt.”

This was a manifest libel on the spotless Helsingfors, but the Ancient had been a little embittered by the thick fringe of black grease which our waterline had acquired while lying in the harbour of Reval.

I had put my oilskins on earlier, and had much amused him by carrying away on “mine starn” the blanket from my bunk as I rose from pulling the trousers down over the boots.

Nothing will tame the prehensile tendencies of tarpaulins.

The wind had shifted a little, but our course gave us a point or two to spare, and we gladly took up the centreboard. Then in a hardish gust a faulty fastening in the mizzen peak halyards came adrift and the peak fell down.

“And were you pleased with him?” I asked, and was delighted by her reply.

“Pleased with him?” said she. “Why, I gave him a proper talking to straight away for being such a fool as to bring two white ostrich feathers. If he’d had but a ha’porth of sense he’d have brought one white one and one black.”

What with talks with the harbourmaster and his wife, whose roughness of tongue was only a defence for the softness of her kind heart, with the lighthouse-keeper from Odensholm, who used to sail in now and again in a little half-decked sloop, and with the …

I could just catch the sunlight splashes on the body of the ship among the trees. Would she ever be finished? And what then? What had he planned as he worked at her year after year?

Would he die before his dream came true, or before he knew that the dreaming was the better part of it?

But the sunlight faded and the wind had freshened, and for a time I thought no more about him, for we had enough to do with our own ship.

A little tree, exactly like the first, is growing close to it, so that when the old one dies or is blown away, another shall be conspicuous in its stead.

The tree is dead; long live the tree!

—and the charts shall need no correction. Would that similar precautions had been taken in other places!

The Worms Lighthouse at Saxbiness was at the other side of the island and hidden from us. Odensholm had sunk below the horizon to the N. There was no light on shore in cottage or farm.

Racundra tasted all the isolation of Noah’s Ark, alone as the flood receded and showed the peaks and uplands of a depopulated earth.

She was, however, aground upon no Ararat, but swung gently to her anchor in a little natural harbour, every mole and breakwater of which was hidden under water.

… had made our present anchorage against this same wind, and I decided to try to get through, making up my mind beforehand that there should be no false squeamishness about dropping back in case we should find ourselves engaged on a hopeless bit of work.

One can always find a good enough reason for doing anything that one has made up one’s mind to do.

In this case I had a perfect one, quite apart from the fact that we did not like staying where we were, and that the jam had been so good that we had eaten all the bread and could get no more till we should …

“And so merry,” he added, “and so active. Runs like a hare and dances … you should see her dance!”

Time, for Captain Konga, did not exist, except that he never had quite enough of it for all he wished to do.

When I offered to send him newspapers, thinking foolishly that he might enjoy them, living alone out there on the wreck with Heltermaa as his metropolis, and that only approachable in fine weather in his little boat, he thanked me, but said he would never …

… only approachable in fine weather in his little boat, he thanked me, but said he would never have time to read them, his life was so busy, what with birds, seals, fish, and the making of cartridges and nets and fishing-lines, drying, salting and skinning.

He was enjoying himself enormously, and, as we talked, I perceived that he always had enjoyed himself enormously, looking neither before nor after, but wholeheartedly engaged in whatsoever he was doing.

And he had done strange things, hunting bears in the Arctic, hunted himself by the women of the Samoyeds maddened by the drinks of civilization. He had his whole life at his fingers’ ends.

The Ancient made a new long wimpel from a strip of red bunting, and when I joked with him for hoisting a Bolshevik flag, replied:

“It’ll give the wind a fright and make it blow the other way.”

But the wind seemed rather to relish it, and blew on day after day.

Peasants from Werder and the mainland and men of Moon and their orange-skirted dames came to the harbour and day after day hung desolately about the cutter in wind and rain, at night getting what shelter they could in the forest.

“This is the Equinotion time,” said the Ancient philosophically, “and this is what musta be.”

He, however, could afford to be philosophic, for he had made his berth tight and comparatively dry, and so was much better off than the unfortunate islanders waiting in the woods for the ferry to take them home.

There was nothing to be done with the weather, for though now and again the wind veered northwards it always backed swiftly to the S.W., while the sea remained in frothy tumult.

It was as if the Equinox had amused himself by setting N.W. and S.W. to fight each other, and now one and now the other got the mastery in a struggle the tension of which hardly slackened for a moment.

I made a curve of our barometer readings on squared paper during that week, but it might have been taken for a graphic record of the progress of a grasshopper. When we came to Werder the barometer was at 29.28.

Our most interesting visitors, however, were two seal-hunters from Runö. I saw them buffeting their way along the quay afar off, and knew at once what they must be.

No other men wear pale homespuns bound with black and hairy sealskin shoes.

No other men go abroad with long telescopes and crooked sticks.

These men, perhaps better than any other Europeans except the Laplanders, continue into our times the life their forebears lived in the Middle Ages and earlier.

Steam has meant nothing to them except a visit from a steamboat once a year.

The Iron Age brought them knives and iron boat-fastenings (though even now they often build without). A flintlock gun, a Japanese rifle, that rare treasure of a Newmarket cap: what are these but trifles? They could kill seals and cover their heads without these things.

We parted with high mutual esteem, expressed by an exchange. I gave them the old pipe I was smoking. The elder man gave me a worn tobacco-pouch.

“Fran England till Runö. Fran Runö till England,” he said, carefully stowing my pipe upon his crowded shelf.

Then there was tremendous handshaking and bowing and taking off of caps. After which the younger man took me ashore. I had got his name, and he begged me to send him the pictures, addressed simply “Arensburg for Runö.”

But Racundra kept quietly on her path, rose as the huge wave reached her, dropped down its mighty back, and was running still while the horizon heaved itself again behind her for another effort.

Racundra, I say, comforted me. She seemed to have no doubt at all about what she could do or couldn’t, and I found myself slowly coming to share her confidence.

I sat with the tiller wedged between my left arm and my body, the hands thrust each into the opposite sleeve of my oilskins, on account of the exceeding cold. The Ancient crouched halfway down the companionway and disliked talking.

As the night went on we began taking more and more frequent glances over the side with an electric torch on the foaming water, to see how fast Racundra was going. She was going much too fast.

We began to feel a special hatred of the dark. It was as if someone had maliciously put the light out, and, with finger ready, was keeping it out for our annoyance.

The night seemed unending. And then, at three o’clock, we saw unmistakably the glow of Riga lights on our port bow. That, of course, was just where they should have been, but we should have preferred to see them an hour or two later.

Could she keep in it? Why, certainly she could, though the rollers were now disturbed by ugly, pyramidal angry waves that rushed across them as if to beat her from her course.

But Racundra, demure, determined, shouldered them good-temperedly aside and held on.

Almost before we knew it we were across the bar and in the entrance, watching with open mouths the tiny boats of the fishermen, labouring with their nets in the huge swell that came in from the sea.

A northerly storm brings the fish to the Dvina, and next day the market was full of big salmon, so that the fishermen were well rewarded for their work.

But Racundra is a lucky little ship.

The night before, another boat, bigger than she, had tried to make the entrance, had failed, and been smashed to pieces in a few minutes on the eastern side of the river mouth.