A VOYAGE IN SAIL

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18629, 26 July 1930, Page 14

A VOYAGE IN SAIL

HORRORS OF THE HORN. Could I but lie in the ocean deep ’Neath the slumbering surges ever to sleep. Where waves enternal stir the sands And move the seaweeds’ sodden strands: Buried for age in the Sea’s deep bed, Dead to the world: to myself not dead: Listening there to the breakers’ boom, Watching the sunlight’s filtered gloom, Till the Sea shall cast up her dead. Not great poetry, the reader may say, with no particular distinction of subject or style. Perhaps not, yet it has a tragic interest which better work might lack. The verse w r as written by Ronald Gregory Walker, a young reporter on a Tasmanian daily paper, who had never been to sea except as a passenger between Hobart and Sydney. Two years later in May, 1929, he was killed in the rigging and buried from the poop of the Finnish full-rig-ged ship Grace Harivar, on the road to Cape Horn. The story behind Walker’s presence on the ship and the tale of a voyage in sail from Australia to Queenstown —a passage subsequently recorded by the newspapers as “uneventful” —is told in “By Way of Cape Horn,” by Walker’s friend, A. J. Villiers, whose “Falmouth For Orders,” has already proved that he can write of the sea and sailingships with force, beauty and sincerity. The Birth of the Idea. Morning in the Tasmanian newspaper office. Outside bright sunshine; inside dusty dingy depression, and a few reporters gloomily seeking a usable typewriter to run out their reports of boring entertainments and insignificant conferences. Then suddenly a paragraph in a Melbourne journal, the reprint of a cutting from a London newspaper, urging that before it was too J.ate someone should ship in one of the big Cape Horn sailers that still survive and make a motion picture of their voyagings.

At once Villiers and young Walker were afire with the idea. Everything was against the scheme. Villiers had returned only four months before from his voyage in the Herzogin Cecilie, and was not anxious to ship before the mast for another run via the Horn. Walker had no sea experience beyond the handling of small yachts. Neither possessed any knowledge of how to work a motion picture camera, nor any money with which to buy one. Finally, it was the wrong time of year at which to sail and the weather was sure to be atrocious. The Grace Harivar. Ail objections, however, melted in the fire of youth and enthusiasm, and April of 1529 saw the two embark upon their long trail, destined for one of them to be the longest trail of all. The ship cn which they sailed was the Grace Harivar, built 40-years before on the Clyde, “a typical deep-waterman, a t-ue sister of the Korn. Her three roasts have a graceful loftiness and the S'.veep cf her deck is entrancing to the f '.iior’s eye.” A creation of “leisured l eai ty. out of place in an age of speed, quick turn-round and dividend-earn-ing,” she had to the unpcetic eye some c_ the defects of her qualities. No brace winches nor halliard winches, and a “patent” windlass, “at which ITclsen might have scoffed and Drake himself have scorned.” And to man this ship of 1749 tons gross register were shipped thirteen hands all told, the average of the seamen being 19! The crew included two green young Australians, cne of whose first questions had been “what do you do when you want to get some sail in and it’s raining?” The first night at sea they found out. when with half a gale blowing from the west they had to shorten her down. Yet somehow the impossible was accomplished. Despite a succession of heavy gales and high seas, the ship was worked end arrived in Queenstown, after a passage of 136 days. But tragedy had touched the Grace Harivar, and there was a man missing from the little crew. Thirty-eight days out from Australia Ronald Walker had finished the gay adventure of his life, and the second mate, whose order had been responsible for the ghastly accident, was slowly driven mad with nerves, blaming himself, quite unjustly, for what had happened. Film Not Marketable. There is something sadly ironical, too. over the fate of the film which had cost so much, except in money, to produce. In spite of all the drawbacks in the way of weather and inexperience, 6300 it. developed excellently. “It was not a perfect picture by any means, nor was it the best that could be got out of that voyage. But it was some record of the ship of sails, battling on a Cape Horn and Walker’s life had not beer, given in vein.” A brief footnote, however, records the fact that no British firm will market the film, or even make ii in the form its photographers intended. The passing of an age is toe shadowy a theme to appeal to a publi. nurtured on blood and thunder. EuL in the reading world there are fortunately still many who will welcome this wan-song of ilie great days of sail. "By Way of the Horn, ” by A. J. Villiers. (Geoffrey Eles.)