When we were young at sea

Abstract

The anonymous poet quoted above whose work you will find in the Exeter Book wrote this poem over a thousand years ago. Yet it describes so well the misery of watch keeping at sea in winter in the Northern Hemisphere, that any seaman of my generation could readily identify with it. The sea is a hard cruel mistress, yet generations of our best youth have gone to sea and entered into that eternal love/hate relationship that seaman have with ships and the sea. There were over 73,000 boys from the National Sea Training schools who went to sea between 1939 and 1966 alone, plus thousands like me who went to the Outward Bound Sea School or made their own way to sea from pier head jumps. In my experience seamen do not love the sea; some hate it, most respect it, many are afraid of it, Sailors however love and belong on ships. We stood on lookout and froze off Newfoundland, and Alaska, Iceland and the Arctic Circle; and we toiled on deck in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, Bombay, and Calcutta, and other hot hellish places. we suffered from maddening scratchy prickly heat and killer heat strokes. We caught malaria in West Africa, and gonorrhoea in Valparaiso. We stood at the wheel for thousands of hours of lonely sea miles, in killer Atlantic Hurricanes, South China Sea typhoons, and Pacific Cyclones, we steered ships through the Dardanelles, the Panama and the Suez Canal, up the Congo, the Hoogaly and the Amazon, and a thousand other lesser rivers. This is my story of a sailor's life on British merchant ships. If there is the odd mistake forgive me: it was a long time ago. In that time I danced the night away with handsome African women in Tombo Mary's, on the African coast. I fell in and out love from Zanzibar to Yokohama, and a few places in between. I have brawled in the Madhouse in Curacao. I have been hit and head-butted, bitten and eye-gouged, kicked and jumped on from Callao to Meina-Al-Amahdi. I have seen the sun rise on the African coast when I was just sixteen, and as a grizzled old bosun seen it set off Nauru one of the loneliest islands in the South Pacific. I have sailed with men you could trust your life with in any situation.... this then is my story.