Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [35]
“If we were off in the southern oceans,” Tom told me one morning, “you’d see albatross, and just the sight of an albatross will wrench your heartstrings. They’re big and graceful and they range over all the oceans of the world, and they live in terrible loneliness as if there really were a curse upon them, just like in the poem.” Sadly, albatross rarely come north of the line, so we didn’t get to spot one, and I fear that a certain restlessness has now descended on my soul—in that special place where we keep our thwarted ambitions.
Along with the bird-watching and sextant studies, Tom and most of the crew had a passion for the Vinland sagas, the ancient Icelandic tales of Leif Eriksson’s discovery of Vinland. Indeed, Tom’s expedition had been premised in part on a desire to follow the journey of Leif Eriksson, who in about AD 1000 set out from Iceland for Greenland, but was blown by storms way to the southwest. As a consequence, Leif was the first European to discover the Americas, which he called Vinland. The saga about his voyage recounts at great length the dastardly exploits of—and I am not making these names up—the unappetizing Ragnar Hairybreeches, the loathsome Erik Bloodaxe, and our hero Leif’s mother-in-law, the redoubtable lady Thorbjorg Ship-Bosom.
For myself, I was never entirely taken with the Viking saga and its rawboned fare. Instead, I buried my head in a volume of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, which I found in the ship’s library. I began with “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” which I learned by heart during a day’s watch, to entertain Hannah. But it was “The Jumblies” that captured the imagination of everyone onboard, with its chorus:
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
Being a vintage wooden boat, Hirta had a tendency to leak in a heavy sea, so the appositeness of this was lost on nobody. Indeed, it wasn’t long before most of the crew could reel off quotes for appropriate occasions as well as chant the chorus. And so the time fairly zipped by—and in five days we had reached Norwegian waters.
This was, according to Tom, “good passage-making.” We had averaged roughly five knots, which is about the speed you back your car into the garage, or toil uphill on a bicycle slowly. Now you might well consider this and conclude that such a journey is a waste of time, and on the surface of things you might be right. It’s an expensive form of travel, too; during five days at sea we had probably consumed enough whisky, Mars bars, tea, canned food, and diesel to buy each of us a flight. And most of the time we were rather wet and cold … and during the first twenty-four hours almost everyone was stricken by seasickness.
It is undoubtedly a madness. And yet I remember reading in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars of how the author once told a Bedouin camel driver that in his flying machine he could do in two hours the journey that would take a camel caravan ten days. The Bedouin pensively scratched his aquiline nose, and then looked deep into the aviator’s eyes. “Why,” he asked quietly, “would a person want to do that?”
I’m with the Bedouin every time here. I’d plump any day for exploring the beauty that the world has to offer. I know people who have never slept a night beneath the stars. In fact, there are probably people who have never climbed a hill, nor swum in a river or a lake. It’s time they did.
AT LAST WE SAW to the north a thin gray line a little more distinct than the horizon. As the hours passed and the breeze drove us on, the line became clearer and finally resolved itself into the jagged cliffs and forested islands of western Norway. We had only been five days at sea, but even so there was a tremendous desire to set foot on dry land. There are those who would have it that sailing is like banging your head against a wall: it’s only good when you