Mischief goes South (eBook)

Every herring should hang by its own tail

H.W. Tilman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016 | 1. Auflage
196 Seiten
Vertebrate Digital (Verlag)
978-1-909461-33-8 (ISBN)

Infos

'No sea voyage can be dull for a man who has an eye for the ever-changing sea and sky, the waves, the wind and the way of a ship upon the water.' So observes H.W. 'Bill' Tilman in this account of two lengthy voyages in which dull intervals were few and far between. In 1966, after a succession of eventful and successful voyages in the high latitudes of the Arctic, Tilman and his pilot cutter Mischief head south again, this time with the Antarctic Peninsula, Smith Island and the unclimbed Mount Foster in their sights. Mischief goes South is an account of a voyage marred by tragedy and dogged by crew trouble from the start. Tilman gives ample insight into the difficulties associated with his selection of shipmates and his supervision of a crew, as he wryly notes, 'to have four misfits in a crew of five is too many'. The second part of this volume contains the author's account of a gruelling voyage south, an account left unwritten for ten years for lack of time and energy. Originally intended as an expedition to the remote Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, this 1957 voyage evolved into a circumnavigation of Africa, the unplanned consequence of a momentary lapse in attention by an inexperienced helmsman. The two voyages described in Mischief goes South covered 43,000 miles over twenty-five months spent at sea and, while neither was deemed successful, published together they give a fine insight into Tilman's character.

Harold William Bill Tilman (1898 1977) was among the greatest adventurers of his time, a pioneering mountaineer and sailor who held exploration above all else. Tilman joined the army at seventeen and was twice awarded the Military Cross for bravery during WWI. After the war Tilman left for Africa, establishing himself as a coffee grower. He met Eric Shipton and began their famed mountaineering partnership, traversing Mount Kenya and climbing Kilimanjaro. Turning to the Himalaya, Tilman went on two Mount Everest expeditions, reaching 27,000 feet without oxygen in 1938. In 1936 he made the first ascent of Nanda Devi the highest mountain climbed until 1950. He was the first European to climb in the remote Assam Himalaya, he delved into Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor and he explored extensively in Nepal, all the while developing a mountaineering style characterised by its simplicity and emphasis on exploration. It was perhaps logical then that Tilman would eventually buy the pilot cutter Mischief, not with the intention of retiring from travelling, but to access remote mountains. For twenty-two years Tilman sailed Mischief and her successors to Patagonia, where he crossed the vast ice cap, and to Baffin Island to make the first ascent of Mount Raleigh. He made trips to Greenland, Spitsbergen and the South Shetlands, before disappearing in the South Atlantic Ocean in 1977.

Textauszug

– Foreword –

Skip Novak

Bill Tilman. It seems I have been trailing in his wake for the last three decades…

In the summer of 1983 I was invited to ‘boat captain’ the sixty-one-foot sloop War Baby for her voyage to Scandinavia and the Arctic. The owner/skipper Warren Brown was a renowned ocean racer and blue water cruiser. In fact, War Baby was a famous racing boat that, as a young lad, I had crewed on in the 1972 Transatlantic Race from Bermuda to Bayona, Spain. At the age of 20, and well before satellite navigation, let alone GPS, I made it a point to understudy the navigator and learned the art and science of celestial navigation en route. Before I realised it I was destined to spend more than a fair share of my life at sea girdling the globe on various around-the-world races and other ocean passages, that eventually overlapped with a long career in expedition sailing to high latitudes that continues to this day.

By the time of our cruise north in 1983 I had been based on the south coast of the UK for seven years and had two Whitbread Round the World Races under my belt. I was still footloose and fancy free, leaving a trail of failed relationships astern in my blind ambition for wild places by land and sea—living out of a sea bag ready for any adventure at a moment’s notice.

For War Baby’s cruise, we prepped from Lymington. One of my responsibilities, in addition to modifying and equipping a former race boat for her cruise north, was to compile a library of Arctic literature pertinent to our itinerary. This is when I first discovered Bill Tilman’s Triumph and Tribulation, realising with regret that back in the mid to late 1970s I had probably passed by him on the dockside in Lymington.

Was it a golden opportunity lost, or a blessing in disguise that I had neither met him nor seen his well-known adverts for crew that promised “no pay, no prospects and not much pleasure”? I might have been in time to sign on for his ill-fated East Greenland expedition with Baroque. In fact, given the time frame, I might have ended up on En Avant… along with the young crew including the 79-year old Bill Tilman, never to be seen again after their stop in Rio de Janeiro on the way to the Antarctic in 1977.

You see, in addition to being a professional sailor, I was a keen and frustrated mountaineer. Had I encountered Bill and started a gam, it would have been more than likely I would have been invited on board for his next expedition—and might have enjoyed what he called on one voyage his “fine view of the Isle of Wight through the port side planking,” of his Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter taking leave of the UK for the great unknown.

During my high latitude baptism on War Baby in 1983, in the space of four months we had visited the Scilly Isles, made a pub crawl in Howth, Ireland (where I fell in love yet again), sampled the liquid production in the Western Isles, made a whistle stop tour of the Norwegian coast from Bergen to Hammerfest, trekked across Bear Island (stupidly without a bear gun), and cruised the north-west and north coasts of Spitsbergen before returning to the UK via the Faroe Islands.

Contingent on taking the job in hand, I was promised that our objectives were to land people to explore inland, which would include some serious trekking, camping and climbing within the abilities of a mixed group. In spite of making every effort to climb every bit of high ground possible (although not necessarily before breakfast as Tilman might have advocated), the schedule was rushed with the owner’s guests coming and going at various ports along the way. Deadlines prevailed. We did manage to camp on the beach known as Gravenset (sealer’s graves) in Magdalena Fjord and we climbed where we thought Tilman had climbed in 1974 , but by and large the voyage was a frustration of too much ocean covered in too short a time and a raft of missed objectives in the hills. Let it be said it was an introduction to the possibilities, and for that I was thankful. Through my obsessions with high ground I was nicknamed ‘Tilman’ by the crew, which suited me just fine.

The result of that foray and the solution to my dilemma was simply to build my own boat. In 1987 I launched my first expedition vessel Pelagic, specifically to sail to remote areas to climb. Over the next three decades the Tilman stories would serve as inspiration to our travels in Patagonia, Spitsbergen, Antarctica and South Georgia. The shipmates who were with me back then all became, and continue to be, Tilman aficionados able to come up with a Tilman one liner, witticism or some sage advice, ad lib. One of our favorites is always “Every herring should hang by his own tail,” of which the meaning is very clear—self-sufficiency is key and don’t expect a bail-out, if you go adventuring. Indeed, on our travels it became a priority to visit as many of the sites, described in the books with typical Tilman style and humour, of several mishaps or near disasters. Mischief in Patagonia which describes his first foray afloat to Chile in 1955–56 provides a surfeit of material.

Anyone who has brought a small boat alongside a jetty or left it and made a hash of the job in front of spectators will no doubt relate to how he described the “aquatic sports” of getting Mischief off the jetty at Punta Arenas, which included a jib dropped overboard, a grounding, an engine that wouldn’t start and being rammed by a Chilean cruiser trying to help. Tilman, an observer of human nature par excellence, summed it up: “It was a Saturday afternoon and one could almost hear the happy sigh of the crowd as they realised how wise they had been to spend it on the jetty.”

In Peel Inlet on the west coast of Chile more trouble ensued at the junction of the Calvo Fjord: “I was steering and elected to pass between two of the biggest [icebergs] which were some fifty yards apart. Although we were watching them pretty intently, for they seemed to be unusually still, it was not until we were up to them that I realised they were aground. A moment later we joined them.” Having also done a lot of exploratory navigation in Chile, rather than being critical of Tilman’s methods, that to a yachtsman would seem irresponsible and cavalier, we on the other hand could empathise. We had our share of groundings, but in the relating afterwards, they were never so cleverly described.

Further on at the north arm of Peel Inlet is Tilman Island, the scene of the infamous grounding when Tilman, Jorge Quinteros and Charles Marriot were crossing the Southern Patagonian Icecap to Lago Argentino. Bill Proctor had been left in charge of Mischief with John Van Tromp and Michael Grove aboard, and as Tilman relates it, “Enough has been said of the extreme north end of Peel Inlet to show that it must be a fascinating place, and apparently Proctor’s curiosity to see it proved irresistible.” Nigh on three and a half tonnes of ballast in pig iron had to be extracted from the bilges and rowed ashore at slack water as they were grounded in a tidal race. After many mishaps and close calls in just staying on station, they managed to float off and then reship the ballast before taking shelter in Sea Lion Bay. We had spent two weeks there in 1993 attempting the unclimbed Mt Aguilera on the Wilcox Peninsula, and in view of the horrendous weather, which is typical, we had time to study and contemplate this debacle in its entirety. It is an accolade that in spite of what could have been the expedition’s undoing, not to mention leaving the three stranded on the beach in the Calvo Fjord, Tilman, instead of making a meal of it, dismissed and forgave Proctor’s folly with that single sentence, perhaps realising his own methods all too well.

In 2004 on Pelagic Australis after another visit to Bear Island we managed to circumnavigate Spitsbergen and sailed through the Hinlopen Straits and into Freemansund, a channel between Barents and Edge Islands, a shortcut which has strong tidal currents. With too much ice on the outside of Edge Island Tilman opted for the channel, in his words, “thus setting the scene for another regrettable incident.”

In short, hanging from a stern kedge, they had to jettison all the vessel’s ballast overboard, being too far from shore to row it in. Ditto all the water. All this while being attacked by ice marching to and fro with the tide, risking their rudder and propeller and losing two anchors into the bargain. A spare mainsail weighing about 400 pounds was also thrown over. Tilman: “Normally I get a lot of harmless pleasure from throwing overboard superfluous gear. The mainsail might be included in that category, but certainly not the ballast.”

Having lost all the ballast they had to ship onboard beach stone to retrim. A discussion ensued about how much weight in ballast could be achieved with stone in the space heretofore occupied by the pig iron. Various optimistic estimates were mooted, before crew member Andrew “invoked the aid of Archimedes” and with a spring balance and a bucket of water calculated that the stone would only achieve a quarter of the weight in pig iron. Tilman’s response is one of my many favorites: “Nothing has an uglier look than reason when it is not on our side, and we hastened to tell Andrew what he could do with Archimedes and his bath water.”

The Tilman stories are reread on a regular basis not only for amusement, but by way of reminding ourselves of our fallibility (mistakes are still made) and for the wisdom of not taking ourselves too seriously. Some ships carry the Bible, we carry Tilman, a continuous source of inspiration and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.9.2016
• Reihe/Serie: H.W. Tilman: The Collected Edition
• Reihe/Serie: H.W. Tilman: The Collected Edition
• Reihe/Serie: H.W. Tilman: The Collected Edition
• Nachwort: Janet Verasanso
• Vorwort: Skip Novak
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport ► Segeln / Tauchen / Wassersport
• Themenwelt: Reisen ► Reiseberichte
• Themenwelt: Reisen ► Reiseführer
• Schlagworte: Adventure • Africa • Aldabra • Antarctic • Antarctic Peninsula • Arctic • Bahia • baroque • Bill Tilman • Bob Comlay • Brazil • Canaries • Cape Town • climbing book • Crozet islands • Cumberland Sound • Deception Island • Expedition • Explorer • Graham Land • Greenland travel • H.W. 'Bill' Tilman • H W Tilman • H.W. Tilman • Janet Verasanso • Lymington • mischief • Mischief goes South • Montevideo • Mountaineering • Mount Foster • Navigating • Navigation • Patanela • pilot cutter • Punta Arenas • Sail • Sailing • sailing book • sea breeze • Shetlands • Skip Novak • Smith Island • southern Indian Ocean • South Georgia • South Shetlands • Tilman • Travel writing • Voyage
• ISBN-10: 1-909461-33-4 / 1909461334
• ISBN-13: 978-1-909461-33-8 / 9781909461338