GIRL ON SAILING SHIP

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18499, 11 September 1934, Page 6

GIRL ON SAILING SHIP

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND AT THE WHEEL IN A GALE - > Few modern girls have expediences the thrill of a voyage in a sailing ship. Fewer still have the courage and stamina to ship in such a vessel as a member of the crew—to work aloft, and to take the wheel in a howling gale and “feel her exultant heart, beating under my hand.” Such experiences are related by Miss Pamela Bourne in a letter to a Wellington friend, posted after the arrival in England of the Herzogin Cocilie, when she completed a voyage of 119 days from Australia. Miss Bourne, who visited Wellington before proceeding to Australia, shipped in the Herzogin—one of the few remaining of the great sailing ships—as a member of the crew. “We are somewhere off the Azores at the moment, flirting along before a gentle sou’-westerly. Perhaps we shall sight them; that will be the first inhabited land wo will have seen since the Kangaroo Island lighthouse went over the horizon,” Miss Bourne writes. “On a bright moonlight night down in the South Pacific we slid past the Antipodes —those remote Antipodes where albatross nest. The next glimpse of terra firma was some few hundred miles off Pernambuco, the desolate Martin Vos islands, sticking up like pine cones in the shimmering midday ocean. “Until wo rounded the Horn I*was on watch, living just like a man. Wo were short of water a bit-, «o that it meant, about a quart a day for washing. My hands, grown horny with much pulling of ropes, were ingrained with most of the contents of the paint locker. BEHAVED NOBLY IN A BLOW “It would be hard for you to believe how much I have come to venerate and to love Herzogin. She is not- only beauti. fill, but so big and strong and grand. She behaves so nobly' in a hard blow, when all her stays are a-qniver and the gale is whistling in every taut rope. She is so graceful, so true, such an aristocrat. “When we were hove-to in the South Pacific at 4 a.m., with practically every sail in ribbons, and seas sweeping under and sometimes over her, the skipper put me alone at the wheel, to free another man for the work in the rigging. CoJVand grey and bitter and, forlorn thotlgp it was, I felt her exultant heart beating under my hand. The mates had lost their voices with shouting, but the chief whispered as he looked at the compass, 'No other ship could have stood it,’ and the skipper, a little later, when we were gulping dbwn hot coffee on top of the gin that had been issued to all hands to keep us going, looked up suddenly and said with great conviction, “She’s a darling!” “This life seems to have every ingredient that makes a real life. Some wiseacres prophesied t-liat I should be sick of the sea after 50 days. Instead 1 wish that we were back in the Spe n eer Gulf and had every arduous and every easy dav (o live over again. When I am’a millionairess 1 shall buy Herzogin and sail up and down between the Horn and the South Indian Ocean among the snow squalls, the flurry of sleet, the bowl of gales, and the grey backs of the great, westerly seas.”