7

 

“Blue to the Mast, True to the Last!”

 

(British sailor’s method of identifying the French tricolor [vertical stripes: red, white, blue] among similar ensigns)

 

In November of 1963 I contracted to deliver the newly built ketch, Rose d’ Archachon, from La Rochelle to Martinique. I had met the owner of the vessel through Mr. Featherstone and it was arranged that I would join the craft in April 1964 for sailing trials in the Bay of Biscay, then get her to the West Indies as soon as could be, before the hurricane season commenced in August.

By this time Cresswell was once again back in the water, with a new mainmast, new sails, a complete paint job, and the engine refitted at a yard far away inland, at Lyons (the city of Lugd, the Celtic god of light). At the beginning of December the groundworks for the printing-factory extension were completed, and, with a couple of hundred dollars in the kitty it was time for me to move on.

During my time at Lormont I had heard vague rumors of a small gathering of British and French yachts wintering over at Toulouse, about 200 miles southeast of Bordeaux on the Canal du Midi, which cuts through France from the Biscay coast to the Mediterranean. The west coast of France can be very cold in winter, and I’d had quite enough cold during the past five years. The city of Toulouse, on the Mediterranean side of the country, has a much milder climate. So I decided to make for Toulouse and leave Cresswell there during the time I would be away in Rose.

For the first and only time in my voyaging career, I adjusted my departure date so that friends and acquaintances could see me off. The day was Saturday, and it poured. Nevertheless, practically the whole working crew of the factory turned up, from Mr. Featherstone in his Rolls-Royce to the Algerian laborers in their djellabas. I doubt if a more motley crowd had gathered in Bordeaux since the Girondaise marched for Paris to take over the French Revolutionary Assembly. The well wishers, who arrived in the pouring rain, brought bottles of wine, cheeses, bread, fruit, cooked dishes and, in the case of the Muslims, a live chicken. They also brought a reporter from the Bordeaux press.

In the pouring rain, I let go of the moorings and, with the boat crowded with friends, made for Bordeaux, 10 miles upstream, to obtain the necessary permits for the passage through the French canal system. All the way along the river, as we neared the boats tied up, there were cries:

“Halloo! Regardez! Cest le bateau perdu!” “Ho! le bateau célèbre anglais!”

Kids scampered and hollered along the cobblestone waterfronts as the boat, painted and polished, new varnished masts gleaming, chugged by, with Nelson standing on the foredeck like a figurehead, gluttering his tongue, exalted at being underway again.

I waited in Bordeaux the weekend, until the canal authority offices opened. All weekend it rained; it simply poured down in sheets. I spent most of the time entertaining and gossiping with friends from all walks of city life: from the mayor’s office, the police, the fire brigade, the navy, the army, and the air force. They all turned out to see le bateau très mystérieux Anglais. The necessary forms to navigate in the interior of France were quickly prepared on Monday, and the prefect himself carried them to the boat.

“Bonjour, M’sieur l’ Anglais!” he shouted streaming with rain as he shook his umbrella on deck. He was surprisingly young.

“Bonjour, M’sieur le prefect; mais je suis Gallois!” I threw my hands up, like a Bordelaise.

“Ah, oui, c’est vrai; mais nous ne connaissons pas la distinction!”

“C’est très simple, M’sieur. Les Anglais sont très distingués; les Gallois sont tres ‘extingués’!”

He laughed and patted my shoulder. (In his lapel he wore the tiny ribbon of the Resistance.) He lit a cigarette, then turned to me, frowning. “Do you know, M’sieur le Gallois, that there is very serious flooding on the river Garonne?”

“Yes. I have read about it in the papers. But that shouldn’t affect me much. I can’t drown—I was born with a cawl on my head!” I had trouble explaining what I meant by “cawl,” but finally he nodded in comprehension.

“Really? C’est vrai?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Yes, and upside down. I was a breech birth, and we say that if you are born feet first you will be hanged—not drowned!”

“Well, mon ami, it may be more serious and dangerous than you suppose. If I were you I would wait here for a week or so and let the floods pass. The Pyrenees Mountains are sending snow in avalanches onto the plains, and the snow is melting, and the river …”

“Ah, what’s a bit of snow? Besides, I’m used to it. I’ll be all right, M’sieur, never you fear. Besides, I really want to get to Toulouse. I have an old friend there. You may have seen him pass through about a year ago.”

“Comment s’appelle?” he asked, draining his teacup.

“Dod Orsborne.”

“Ah, the famous, irrepressible Dod! Of course I met him. Quel type! But he is so old?”

“About 80, and I hear he’s in a bad way. I want to go down and cheer him up a bit before he croaks.”

“Well, M’sieur le Gallois, that’s good. Also, don’t forget that Wales is playing rugby at Toulouse next month.”

“That, too. And I hear we have a good team this season, all piss and vinegar.” The prefect laughed as I translated the phrase literally into French.

“Oui, that’s good: la pisse et le vinaigre! So you think it will be another Waterloo, eh, mon ami?”

“For sure, and a Crecy, and an Agincourt, and if it’s raining a Trafalgar, too!”

“Merde!” He turned to go up the ladder. At the top, he turned again. “Bien, mon chef marin, bonne chance!”

“Mercy buckets, M’sieur. See you next time.”

I started the engine, the prefect cast off my lines, and I was off, into the flooded Garonne River. The floods and Cresswell met at the first stop on the river route to the canal, at the town of Langon. I arrived there at dusk and, sighting a cozy-looking estaminet along the waterfront, headed for the mooring berth, just outside the door, and tied up. There was not a soul about. The door was shut but not locked; I opened it, stepped inside, and shouted, but no answer. I stepped outside again. Then I heard a noise, a soft rumble at first, then louder. Then I heard a shout. I looked up to the roadway on the hill above the long, cobblestone jetty, where two gendarmes were waving their arms and shouting at me.

“Take your boat away to anchor! Get out in the river!”

Then I saw it: a wall of water, about eight feet high, driving straight down the river, about two miles away.

I dove onboard, scrambled for the long stormline, and made it fast on the knighthead. With the other end secured to the ringbolt on the jetty, I cast off all the other lines and let her go. The boat immediately started to scrape her way stern first down the long jetty, but in two shakes I had the engine started and was heading the bows out into midstream. Once there I ran forward, as the boat swung wildly in the fast current, heaved the anchor over the bow and let all the line go. When the anchor bit, the bows were head-on to the current, with the engine running at full speed; and so she was held against the flood.

The wall of water, when it arrived, was just that. It was almost vertical. Brown, muddy water topped with gray foam. It ran straight over the boat. For a minute or so Cresswell was, or seemed to be, completely under water. A ton of cold water sluiced into the cabin—the cabin I had spent weeks cleaning and varnishing and making shipshape. I cursed like a trooper. I was shit-scared, but angry at my bad luck.

As soon as he saw the waterbore speeding down on us, Nelson hightailed it aft for the cabin, and I grabbed the steering wheel and locked both arms around it, but the force of the water, when it hammered onto the boat, nearly tore me away. For a minute or two Cresswell heeled over onto her starboard side, then swung back and heeled over onto her port side, then swung back and heeled over onto her starboard side, with the freezing water from the snows of the Pyrenees pouring over her in a brown, muddy cataract. Then the anchorline snapped.

“Holy Moses!” I gasped, wet through. Nelson managed to crawl topsides.

Back went the boat, with the heavy stormline tied to the submerged jetty, with the engine still running, but in neutral. Back she went, at a tremendous rate, until the full length of the stormline was snapped taut. Then she swung with a crash, wildly, into the river bank, over the top of the waterfront roadway which was now six feet under water, and whooshed right over the flooded church graveyard.

As the side banged against the church wall, I scrambled forward, grabbed the snapped anchorline, tied a bowline into the broken end, and lassoed one of the church gargoyles. Thank God it did not snap off under the weight of the wildly weaving boat! I did all this automatically; then I set to bailing the boat out. Tons of mucky, filthy, oily water.

When the first rush of the flood passed, the water continued to rise, until it was around 16 feet above the normal level of the river. Broken trees, wooden sheds, animals, driftwood, barrels, and the flotsam of half the farms in the Midi swirled by. And there I was, tied up to a village church! And there I stayed, with the waters rushing past, with the rain pouring down, for three days, until the flood started to subside. For most of the two days the side of the boat was fended off just below a great stained-glass window. I cleaned out the muck, cursing the whole time.

On the second day, with the current down to about two knots, I started the engine, let go of the gargoyle, motored to a spot above the jetty ringbolt, cast off the coiled-up stormline, weighted, and, following a small French police launch, cruised around the town, picking up people stranded in attics and on the roofs of flooded houses and ferrying them to a spot on the side of the hill. We must have had well over 200 passengers that day.

The flood was so high that most of the town was inundated, and Cresswell was able to pass the length of the main street. At each house I approached to rescue the folk, a great cheer went up as the boat, a veteran of so many storms and hazards in the oceans, cruised sedately around above the streets of a French town 70 miles inland!

We picked up people of all shapes and sizes and gave them hot tea and sandwiches. Old ladies clutching bundles, men and boys in blue overalls, teenagers and kids (enjoying the whole thing immensely, now that the weather had cleared up), and tiny tots and babies.

Nelson got excited only when babies and other dogs came onboard. A gentle kick subdued him when female dogs were around, a curse when he growled at the male dogs. He fussed over the babies and was fed bits of cooked meat by the mothers and kids, who in turn fussed over him.

By the end of the third day, everyone who’d been stranded was safe and dry on high ground. The rain stopped, the water level rapidly decreased, and the flood speed diminished. A French Navy craft arrived to anchor before the town, and Cresswell was tied up alongside her while frogmen gallantly recovered my main anchor and stormline. By the end of the week the river was almost back to its normal level, and so I pressed on eight miles upstream and entered the lock gates of the Canal du Midi, where the boat would be safe from further floods.

Many of the British think that the first modern lock-controlled canal was the Bridgewater Canal, near Manchester, constructed about 1780. This is not so. During the 1600s the great French cardinal, Richelieu, ordered the building of the Canal du Midi, from the Atlantic coast of France to the Mediterranean, in order that small French vessels could carry cargoes, and especially cargoes of war materials, between the two coasts of France without having to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar or the British Navy blockades. For that time, it was a magnificent engineering feat, rising over the highlands of the Haute Garonne. As far as Toulouse, much of it has been modernized, especially in Napoleonic times, but south of Toulouse long stretches of the canal are in the original state, as it was built 300 years ago.

The passage from Langon to Toulouse was peaceful and calm. When the weather was kind it was a great pleasure to chug along at an amiable rate over the graceful viaducts, sometimes 300 feet in the air, as they pass over valleys and farms. I would sometimes stop the boat and gaze over the side of the brick water-bridges and watch the flooded Garonne with its tributaries as they rushed down to Bordeaux and the sea. But I could not linger long, as the canal was icing up.

The passage through Toulouse by canal was delightful. We passed through the busy center of the great city, along Richelieu’s canal, through old worn-brick, rosy-colored tunnels, with creepers from back gardens hanging over the ancient walls. The contrast, when the boat emerged into the roar of the city center—with all the traffic and the people in the early morning rush to work at the aircraft factory (where the Concorde supersonic plane had been started)—was like a time warp to my senses.

Dod Orsborne was at the boat basin, biding his time between the local estaminet and a friend’s boat. It was obvious he was ailing despite his oxlike constitution.

“Hello, Dod, I’ve heard so much about you. It’s a pleasure to meet you!”

“H’lo, where’ve you come from?”

We sat in the pub on the waterfront and spun yarns that wet day, and it was good to see how Dod’s eyes lit up when I told him of my adventures in the north.

Dod was spare and lean, with a bronzed face, Van Dyke beard (now pure white), and dazzling blue eyes under shaggy brows; he wore an old peaked cap and pea jacket. A living, walking, laughing legend, Dod had been the skipper of the English herring trawler Girl Pat back in 1936.

One fine day he and his crew decided they’d had enough of the Arctic; so he just upped nets and made for the West Indies! After a tremendous, gale-tossed passage through the middle of the hurricane season, their small 40-footer had arrived at the then British island of Trinidad and Dod was arrested and sent back to England, where he became the last man to be tried at the Old Bailey Courthouse on the charge of barratry. This is the crime committed by a skipper who makes away with the vessel under his command without permission of the owners. But the story told by Dod and his crew was so innocent and funny and courageous that the charge was dismissed; it was laughed out of court.

Having made contact with Venezuelan revolutionaries, Dod went to South America in the late thirties and was engaged in gun running there. During World War ll he was commissioned into the Royal Naval Reserve as the skipper of a minesweeper-subchaser in the North Sea. Then he transferred to running commandos to the coast of Europe, which of course was just up his alley, and had several bloody run-ins with the German forces in Festung Europa.

On D Day of the Normandy invasion, Dod was among the first ashore on the British Army beaches. With his gungy seaman’s cap at a swashbuckling angle, he charged up the beach, waving a cutlass.

But apart from this, he could write about his adventures. His two books, Danger Is My Destiny and Skipper of the “Girl Pat,” did quite well in the postwar years, enabling him to live modestly in his boat and cruise the coast of Europe. But now, at age 80 he was, slowly sinking, though merrily, for his intake of French wine was a wonder even to the Frenchmen.

I felt highly privileged to sit with him, stranded in a French town far from his beloved northern waters. Many a yarn was spun, with laughter, with sorrow, with joy. We knew full well that some of life’s rare moments were at hand.

One fine though chilly evening, Dod and I were returning to our boats along the cobblestone canal waterfront, still chatting and reminiscing. Across the canal, against a grassy bend, several French craft were moored, mostly pleasure craft, both sail and power. Onboard a 40-foot sailing craft, lights were shining brightly and the music and laughter floated to us above the roar of the traffic crossing the canal bridge nearby.

“Noisy blighters,” said Dod, clomping his walking stick on the cobbles. Under the dim lamplight near Cresswell, a black shadow moved suddenly and Nelson came hobbling toward us, his tail wagging. I’d just bent over to pat him when there was an almighty bang. The party boat had blown up! The whole doghouse went sailing through the crisp night air, landing on the jetty only a few feet away from us. The doghouse top was accompanied by bodies, half a dozen of them, that came crashing down into the murky canal waters. With a sickening thump, one of the bodies landed head first on the cement edge of the canal. It was a woman, whose head was smashed in like a melon.

“Get a boat!” shouted Dod—now, in an emergency, his old self. Like a young man, he sprang into a canal cleaner’s dory, tied up against the jetty. I followed him, and soon we were picking people out of the water. Two men were unconscious but still alive. Then we went after the screaming men and women who were still in the water, floundering around in panic. Soon we had them onboard the dory and landed them, crying and moaning, onto the jetty.

The other people in the boat basin had heard and seen what was happening. Soon first-aid was being rendered by various onlookers, while I dashed to Cresswell to make a big pot of hot, strong tea. (The local gendarmerie and fire brigade merely waved their arms in the air and started writing on thick pads.) Soon the tea had the survivors, all five of them, in a calmer mood.

The butane-gas cooking stove of the sailing boat, which had disappeared into the canal waters, had leaked deadly gas into the bilge. A cigarette had been lit, and whoosh! the whole shebang had gone up. Explosions like this cause more deaths in small craft than any other type of accident.

Later, after he had recovered from his shock, the owner of the craft, Monsieur DuPont, came over and introduced himself to Dod and me. While drying his clothes in Cresswell’s cabin, he told us he was married to a doctor and he had been in the French Resistance. (In France, practically everyone claimed this, but in M. DuPont’s case it was true; he had been a leading light in the Midi Resistance movement.) He was now the French agent of an American medical equipment manufacturer, and there and then gave Dod and me the job of salvaging the boat. We told him we’d salvage his boat for nothing and would arrange for a friend of ours, an itinerant Manxman, a fishing-boat carpenter, whom we’d met in the pub, Joe by name, to repair his boat.

In this way did I meet M. DuPont and his good lady, who for the whole winter entertained Dod, Joe, Nelson, and me at their house on Sundays for a slap-up meal. And in France that is enough to last an Arctic hand a week!

M. DuPont later introduced us to the faculty of the University of Toulouse. Every Thursday night, Dod and I put on our best bib and tucker and attended the university’s English-culture course to show the sprightly lads and lively lassies (about 200 graduates) how to make tea correctly. We also gave talks on soccer and cricket, fish and chips, the “pub culture” (this alone took a month), and British courting routine, which of course is very different from the French way, the latter being surprisingly restrictive (women did not come of age, in those days, until age 28!).

We enjoyed these evenings tremendously. After classes, Dod sat in the Café Pensez-Y, opposite the university entrance, surrounded by a great crowd of young worshipers, telling his salty takes of derring-do, while I hovered to one side learning about the latest Beatles music, which was a craze among young French people at the time. Dod, Joe, and I were plied with glass after glass of Alsatian (bock) beer, and Joe and I made them laugh with his attempts at French in our Manx and Liverpool accents. Outside the brightly lit, warm cafe, with its walrus-moustached, long-aproned waiters and cheery madam (who at the age of 90 still had a sparkle for Dod), the snow and rain twinkled and sprinkled.

In March 1964 I resecured Cresswell’s mooring lines, opened all the cupboard doors, closed all the hatches, showed Joe and Dod where the bilge-pump key was and where they should leave Nelson’s food, gathered my sextant, sea clothes, sleeping bag and navigation tables, and caught the train for St. Nazaire.

I was off to deliver the 38-foot ketch Rose d’ Archachon to the Antilles, then bring back the yawl Quiberon from Cayenne to Marseille.

I left Cresswell in the care of Nelson. I left Nelson in the care of Dod. I left Dod in the care of Joe. And I left Joe in the care of M’sieur DuPont, who in turn was very ably supervised by his charming lady-doctor wife. So all was well and I headed for St. Nazaire with a good conscience.

At the ‘B’ International Match the Wales rugby team beat France hollow, which was good for free drinks from all around before I left Toulouse.