1 Voyages of the Nora Dane View as a pdf A novel dedicated to Jean’s mother, Brenda, who encouraged her to tell her story. Neither spoilt a good yarn by labouring over the facts. Any likeness to real persons in this dramatised re-telling is coincidental with no offence intended. I thank Sherry for her patience, assistance and advice. Preamble In the corner of a suburban backyard is a rusting lantern. Its burner, wick and mantle have long since disappeared. Soon all but its glass lens will decompose. Children see it and ask “what’s that?” They are told, “It’s an old ship’s light that’s brass plate reads Anker.” This is the story of the lantern’s final journey under sail. It is a story of arrivals and departures; coming and goings sometimes as brief ships that pass or as final as the sailing traders’ passage into history. 2 First Voyage – Salvage or Tax Chapter One – A Mission to the Baltic Chapter Two – Passage to the Elbe Chapter Three – Incident off Dungeness Chapter Four – Hamble and Home Second Voyage – Outward bound Chapter One – Passage Plans Chapter Two – Farewell Chapter Three – Across the Biscay Chapter Four – The Rock of Gibraltar Chapter Five – The Pirate Kings Last Voyage – Homeward bound Chapter One – Turning a dollar Chapter Two – Escape to Cascais Chapter Three – Return across Biscay Chapter Four – Hamble and homeless The Seaman’s Word – A Maritime Glossary Historical Notes – Attribution 3 First Voyage – Salvage or Tax Chapter One – A Mission to the Baltic In the northernmost Baltic seaport of Töre the Arctic winter of 1966 had come early. The boats in the cove had been pulled ashore. Those afloat were already iced in. Captain Larsen’s Galeas rode to her anchor some metres off the rickety town jetty. Not that the anchor was doing much, as she was surrounded by the thick pack ice. The Captain’s miserable reward for the late delivery of a pitiful part cargo of broken bricks was to be trapped from departure. At the end of a bitingly cold day, the Captain’s son and sole crewman Piers was attending to the lamps. Wearing fingerless woollen gloves he could barely feel, but like a thousand times before, he filled the kerosene burner, wound up the wick and struck a match. He deftly sheltered its fragile flare from the flurries of snow as the wick caught alight. After replacing the glass mantle it glowed brightly. For some moments he cradled the mantle with calloused hands, feeling its delicious warmth on his numb finger tips, then for the final time he hauled the anchor lantern high up into the rigging where it shone out from the darkness like a star. This final duty done, Piers strode to the aft cabin where he tried to avoid his father’s pleading eyes. No words were spoken. The money jar on the shelf was empty again, and that was that. Piers gathered the sum of his earthly possessions in a knapsack, climbed to the deck and slid down onto the harbour’s snow-dusted sheet of ice, to tramp off towards the township’s lights without looking back. The galeas, sometimes called a Baltic Trader, is a stout little schooner, typically of one to two hundred tons, game enough to poke its bluff nose into the smallest creek of the Baltic’s island-studded archipelagos, but large enough for passages over Arctic seas. In the last century islanders’ harvest surplus of potatoes, grain and timber were traded for coal, farm machinery, some luxuries and always news from afar. These ships were built from hewn oak frames supporting double pitch pine planking stout enough to cut through ice. They were driven by gaff sails on Douglas fir masts, two or maybe three, with square sails on the foremast. Their hulls carried an elegant sheer from bowsprit tip to heart-shaped stern. A painted clinker longboat hung from curved transom davits like a pearl earring. Described 4 as having a cod’s head and a mackerel’s tail, these little ships would bash through a seaway to windward or scud homeward on a run. None was stronger or more capable than those built by the master ship builder from Viken, Janne Hagerman. His craft sat on the water like swans. The fleets that had once dominated the Baltic Sea were in decline by the 1960s. Container ships and bridge building finished off what wartime U-boats had begun. Struggling to compete with road transport their rigs and crews were cut back and auxiliary engines installed. It was still backbreaking hand loading an island's summer plenty and the work was freezing in winter. Worse still, when a cargo could not be found, profitless rocks for stabilising ballast must be sought, bought and loaded. A father and son could just about manage what half a dozen men had done before. But no son now wanted that life and the fathers could not do it alone. A fire sale of these last working sailing ships, the galeas, was brokered by Christiansen’s of Copenhagen and others, and the adventurers of the world came looking for a bargain. Jeff and Jean Hope were bargain hunters. But where money is fluttering the taxman is alerted. Ships relocating to English ports would be taxed from the last day of 1968, precipitating a race that jeopardised prudent seamanship. Come storm or high water Jeff had a deadline of a month to select, purchase, refit and deliver the prize of a little ship to home waters. For this purpose his delivery crew squeezed into a compartment of the London to Harwich boat train on the last Sunday in November, bound for Copenhagen. On this unseasonably mild afternoon Jeff, Jean, their companion Bill and son Ranger were overclad in sailing suits designed for the Arctic. Their compartment was entered from a main corridor through a narrow sliding door. Inside, twin upholstered bench seats provided cosy seating space for eight persons, three of whom were already seated. Above them, on the maple panelled bulkhead was an ornately etched mirror. A shelf below held eight glass tumblers and a pitcher of drinking water, which was immediately upset on their noisy entry with much ado and apologies all around. To the added discomfort of fellow passengers their already bulky attire was supplemented with voluminous sailing bags, a bulging leather satchel and a wooden crate. Marked “fragile”, the rope-handled crate was plastered with labels depicting shattered wine glasses. The guard had insisted that it be placed in the baggage compartment. However finding it heavier than expected, and yet so easily manhandled by big Bill, he had been coerced into allowing it as cabin 5 luggage. It now propped open the compartment’s sliding door, half in and half out of the corridor, presenting an obstacle for every passer-by. Now in middle age Jeff, an Australian, was noted for a raucous laugh that rivalled the kookaburras. This gift was used by his family locate him in a crowd, and had prompted a famous comedian to ad lib “give that man a lifelong ticket to my shows.” From boyhood Jeff’s resentment of authority was the bane of his parents’ and teachers’ best efforts to civilise him. When scolded that he must learn his alphabet so he could chant it standing on his head, he had perversely learnt it in reverse to amuse the class; a trick that in later life did nothing to improve his office skills. His frequent truancy was a blessing for those teachers, who preferred him to engage in pranks while paddling the bays in Sydney’s Port Jackson rather than in their classroom. Jeff yearned to stow away on one of the ships that daily steamed clear of the rules and mediocrity of dull Mosman. Regularly he would cadge a ride to steer the “SS Tanda” from Pyrmont’s frozen meat wharfs to the passenger dock at Woolloomooloo. To him, the Great Depression described his childhood more than the state of the nation. In January 1940 he finally escaped for Suez on the S.S. Orford, in convoy with twelve troopships, incredibly shipping with them horse drawn artillery from the first war. So began his first adventure in the charnel- house of war. The Orford and Jeff were flaming wrecks only months later. As a signalman in the Egyptian Campaign, Jeff had to crawl out under the barrage into no-man’s land dragging a telephone and cable, to report target accuracy. His threat to shoot the “sick donkey”, as he called the colonel responsible for his near death by friendly fire, was the last of several attempts to prove his mental unfitness for duty. Jeff was recalled for court martial on the troopship the SS Strathallan, but detoured from Singapore days before Japanese forces invaded. To avoid torpedos, as her sister ship Stratheden had demonstrated earlier, she zigzagged homeward through the freezing Southern Ocean; “via the South Pole,” Jeff would later claim. In Canberra awaiting court martial, the fall of Singapore hardened the military to a back-to-the-wall mind-set. Choosing between death by firing squad or manning an isolated signal station in occupied New Guinea, was not hard. A year of hell in the jungle of Merauke left the corporal with the skills of a radio technician, a case of lurking black dog exacerbated by “wowsers” (as he defined those who spoil fun) and a discharge as medically “unfit” (as they defined those sufferers from paranoid psychosis). Like many young men whose youth was robbed, Jeff's war experience was boredom laced with occasional terror.