AT THE WHEEL IN A GALE

Taranaki Daily News, 11 September 1934, Page 10

AT THE WHEEL IN A GALE

GIRL ON SAILING VESSEL. VOYAGE FROM AUSTRALIA. Few mioderh girls have experienced 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 Boume in a letter to a Wellington friend, posted after the arrival in England of the Herzogin Cecilie, 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 we will have seen since the Kangaroo Island lighthouses went over the horizon,” Miss Boume 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 we rounded the Hom I was on watch, living just like a man. We were short of water a bit, so that it meant about a quart a ’ day for washing. My hands, grown homy with much pulling of ropes, were ingrained with most of the contents of the paint locker. “It would be hard for you to believe how much I have come to venerate and to love Herzogin. She is not only beautiful, but so big and strong and grand. She behaves so nobly in a hard blow, when all her stays are a-quiver 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. Cold and grey and bitter and forlorn though it was, I felt her exultant heart beating under my hand. The mates had lost their voices 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 down 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 that I should be sick of the sea after 50 days. Instead I wish that we were back in the Spencer Gulf and had every arduous and every easy day to live over again. When I am a millionairess I shall buy Herzogin and sail up and down between the Hom and the South Indian Ocean among the snow squalls, the flurry of sleet, the howl of gales and the grey backs of the great westerly seas.”