Red Conor the Rover

NZ Truth, Issue 1035, 26 September 1925, Page 5

Red Conor the Rover

"I'll sail six o' the SeOen Seas, An' I'll sail 'em proper, he God I In latlitoods breezy, With a crew uneasy, I'll sail 'em proper, be God— . - ■ ' Six o' the Seoen Seas!" — Song of Red Conor, the Rover. In this age, no more remarkable cruise was ever undertaken than that of Red Conor O'Brien — yachtsman, rebel, churcharchitect, and ex-gun-runner— who wasannounced by cable recently to have completed a two-years '"voyage round the world, via the terrible Cape Horn, m his 11-ton. yawl, the Saoirse. Conor," on his extraordinary Odyssey, put m at Melbourne last year — twice, for a variety of reasons; And sundry adventures he had there help to illustrate the personality of this amazing mariner, the wildest and ijhe most lovable of Irishmen, and as hardy a thrill-hunter as ever sailed a sea.

E blew into Port Melbourne without preliminary flourish or announcement. His little ship, flying the tri-color of the Irish Free State and the handsome ensign of the Royal Irish Yacht Club, nosed her way to an anchorage early one morning.

Then Conor came ashore — a picturesque person with a roguish eye, a weather-Avorn face, and a scraggy red beard. And suspended from . a tarry piece of. cord slung round- his neck was what must have been the largest and heaviest revolver m the world. Its dimensions would have turned Hoot He-man, of the movies, bilious with ( envy. This singular mariner cheerfully owned that he was m the thick' of the Irish rebellion. It was between rows and scrums, that he built his little dream -ship with his own hands on che beach at Baltimore. His original profession as a church architect he "not unnaturally, found dull early m the piece. , Besides, he remarked, nobody seemed to be building churches m these turbulent times. | His lust for rugged adventure em- j broiled him m a gun-running venture with Erskine Childers. TAME WORK. "It was tame work. We weren't chased • once," was his commentary. And then the war burst like a thunderstorm on a world without an overcoat. Red Conor, rebel and Republican, couldn't resist the scrap. He bluffed his way irito a captaincy m the Royal Navy. But they soon found him out to be an amateur sailor, and trans-' ferred him to the reserve. "There," he says with a grin, "I rose to the giddy height of being given command of a mine-sweeper. But it was tame work, and damned : few subs, and torpedoes came my 1 way." So it came about, urged by his insatiable lust for rugged adventure, he and a couple of friends set away aboard the Saoirse — which, incidentally, is pro-, nounced "Sao-shay," and means "Freedom" — with an irresponsibly vague idea of reaching -New Zealand and climbing Mount Cook. . . . Things happened early m the voyage, which was destined to take him completely round the globe and through the stormiest seas known to sailormen. Everybody was drunk at the time, and the Saoirse was trickling blithely adown the West African coast, when out of nowhere a storm rose up and slapped them good and hard. They were blown hundreds of miles out of their course, and for days and nights' without rest they had to light wildly lor their lives against the elements. The entertaining, result of this episode was that, instead of coming up on the West African coast, they found themselves at Pernambuco, Brazil, on the opposite side of the Atlantic! Between effecting repairs to the ship and high jamborees and sprees ashore, Conor arrived at the conclusion that his companions had turned out to be "a lot of loafing '• bounders." So m his precise style, he kicked them off, to get home from Brazil as best they could, and sailed . merrily on without them. v He re-crosed the Atlantic with a nigger for a crew. But when the' yawl', touched Capetown the nigger vanished. He'd had enough. And- again, when Conor put m at Durban, the crew he . got at Capetown vanished too. They'd had enough. For the voyage along the bottom end of 'the Indian Ocean to Australia and Melbourne, Conor signed on a sixteen-years-old motor mechanic, a taxi-driver, and an able seaman, who hadn't been afloat since he sailed on the last voyage of the Eros, once the crack French clipper Chan tiers D'lvegeon. And on that voyage m the Eros the tucker ran out, the water went sour, the tobacco got low. Indian Ocean storms and calms made a plaything of her. She sprang a leak, and her .cargo shifted; her crew got scurvy, and one went mad. The skipper's wife had a child and the cook went bald. He reckoned Ke'd had enough of the sea after that — but, for all that, he signed on with Conor. He was sorry. The light-hearted Irishman put forth, from Durban with only sufficient potatoes for half the voyage and a case of magnificent whisky for every

pound of sugar m the ship's stores — and there were only 121bs of sugar! "Weigh -hey! Drink it down, boys, Let the demiiohn merrily gurgle . . !" i No one m Melbourne could rival Conor's throat for whisky. He hadn't been m port two days before he'd restocked his bar, and with' Australian whisky. "Young, but good," wats his judgment as he poured out a pannikinful neat, and handed it to an apprehensive newspaperman. Somehow, that started things, and a perilous trip ashore was made m Conor's patent collapsible canvas dinghy. . . First he gave the crew £4. "Better get m some tucker for the trip to New Zealand," he said. "Y/ou can keep some of the change out of it for yourselves." , Provisions! £4! ' But the crew did what all Conor's previous crews did. They skipped ashore at the. first chance, and they didn't come back. Nor would a team of elephants have got them back. The taxi-man's revised opinion of a life on the ocean wave would be regarded as an epic throughout the world were it not for the unfortunate fact that it cannot be printed. ; "Blast me !" said the A.8., and choked, when his opinion was sought. The boy didn't say anything, but left straightway for a i place where there are farms and pastures and' lowing , kine, and nothing salty m sight except saltlicks. Ashore with the newspaperman, Conor steered an unerring path for a waterside hostelry of dingy aspect arid riotous repute, and by the time he emerged he agreed that it was time to get aboard again. The newspaperman had a launch handy, and as the pair were chugging, away from the jetty a. bleak, unsteady, figure hove" m sight. "Whoa!" he yelled, m a most un- • nautical fashion, and tried to step into the boat, which was then thirty feet away. The unsurprising result was that he trod deeply on the surface of 10 fathoms o,f water. A little later five tons of launch and engine bumped him gently on the back of the head, and Conor, hilarious with glee, neatly spiked him m the abdomen with a boathook. HAULED OUT. With many a yo-heave-ho the damp one was hauled out and deposited m the bottom of the boat, where he lay jn a squashy heap suffering the volcanic emotions incidental to his stomach's rejection of a gallon or two of superfluous salt water. « He turned put to be the president of a certain club, who had come down to welcome Conor, but who - had somehow got lost on the malty way. Once aboard the Saoirse he recovered sufficiently to stand up and fall down again. The novelty . of this plainly appealed to him. • He did it well, and he know it. He thought he'd go one better-— so he dived head first down a com-panion-way.; It .took a pazmikin of Conor's liquor to bring him round, and two pannikins to restore Conor himself to good humor. The hazardous job of getting the president back into the launch was accomplished, and the trip across the bay and up the river to Melbourne was commenced. Conor came along, which was a fortunate thing for the president, who considered it necessary to poke his head out from the launch cabin . to repeat his assurance that he "really'd never bin s'drunk m all'sh life," And he became ' seasick. ENTANGLED IN ENGINE. Circumstances over which he had no control took him forcibly m charge then. His trousers became entangled m the engine fly-wheel. He was lifted to a unique horizontal position, and then flung with a bone-rattling bump to the bottom of the boat. : His surprise was benign. He scrambled to his feet, surveyed the wet world around him with mild astonishment — and fell backwards out of the boat into the sea. It was only the dexterity and the rapidity of action that had carried Conor safely through his adventurous career that enabled him to make a grab at a disappearing ankle, but it

seemed a long- time before the/bubblemarked countenance of the presidential reveller appeared above the surface. "Don't be rough, you fellersh. Don't be rough!" he gurgle.d.> as he was hoisted aboard. And then, as if to cap his clownish •day, he undressed and flung all his clothing except his boots and shirt overboard. And thus came the president home, wrapped m an oil-skin and an odor well known to wives. And thus came Conor unto Melbourne. FANTASTIC FATE. And as long as he stayed there and almost wherever he went, something fantastical seemed always fated to happen. Ho and his gun, his red beard, and his pea-green suit, constituted a central point from which radiated a hilarious cycle of Wild and woolly happenings. Though he originally said he was . only going to stay in -Melbourne three days, he stayed twelve. Then he found a crew and set away again with New Zealand as his next stopping-place. But it wasn't long before lie was back m Melbourne again. As he enriched the ozone with high language he booted his crew, ashore, and announced; while a wondering throng gathered and listened, awestruck, that if they ever set, foot aboard his yawl again he'd "plug 'em." Aiid he produced hla pocket edition of a howitzer and waved it ferociously. It was evident that something had gone wrong. Down m his cabin a little later Conor filled two pannikins. MUTINY! "Mutiny, by. God!" he yelled. He handed one pannikin to the newspaperman, who was beginning to feel that he was fated never to see the last of this marine, disturber of the peace. "One of 'em snared a bottle of my whisky, by God! So I've come*-' back and kicked the rotten lot off!" And though Conor intended to stay another day to get a new. crew, he lingered on for three weeks, and made the waterside buzz m that' fashion so peculiarly his own. t ■ ■ * '■ There- was nearly the sacking of his second Melbourne ■ crew just before he again put to sea. The newspaperman was standing on. the yawl's' deck as the new hands — the three were under twenty years of age — busied themselves tidying her up, when Conor emerged fronV his cabin with a wrathful face. "Where are the spring onions?" he demanded. . The crew didn't know. "■ f'Then what the hell," bellowed Conor, with a whirl of his arms, "what the hell are we going to do about salad now?"- ' "We got 'some brown onions," chipped/in one of the hands, hopefully.. ' : . '■■; The irate skipper seemed on the verge of ..saying, something immense, when someone nearly trod on the ship's supply of eggs, which had come aboard m a cardboard bo t x and had been left on the deck. EGGS. AND TOMATOES. "I want everyone aboard to consider he's m the Navy," directed Conor. "Take the tomatoes below and stow that coal, away m the bunker. Get the eggs into the galley and cook some of 'em; put those books m my bunk and that chart m the saloon rack. The bottles? Put the bottles with the books." And. so Conor sailed away on his restless quest for red-blooded adventure m the stormy seas of the South. He sailed to New Zealand, and pottered round the coast of these islands for a long time, hiring crews, sacking them, and getting hot-tempered because a good country was threatened with prohibition. Then ■he trekked away across the Southern Pacific, battled grimly; a song m his heart, with the Horn pests, and has now gone home to Dublin. Fifty thousand people welcomed the Saoirse home. She came up the harbor escorted by 150 vessels and to a salute of guns. No one has ever maligned Dublin by describing it as a- quiet city, but it won't be any quieter for Conor's presence there. . f ■