SHIPS WITH SAILS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 930, 7 June 1957, Page 13

SHIPS WITH SAILS

THE LAST GRAIN RACE, by Eric Newby; Secker and Warburg, English price 21/-. ARCH, 1939. Lying in Port. Victoria were the Pamir, the Passat, the Archibald Russell, the Winterhude, the Lawhill, the Kommodore Johnsen, the Padua, the Pommern, the Olivebank. It was to be the last grain race, as things turned out, and altogether 13 ships took part in the 1939 sailings. The Moshulu was in port, too, and this is her story, by Eric Newby. Newby was no sailor. He was a delightfully egotistical young man of 19 who left an advertising agency "on the day we lost the Cereal Account," and decided to go to sea. The short chapter on the agency is a boisterous prelude to a lively book. Green as a grasshopper Newby joined the Erikson fourmaster Moshulu, in dry dock at Belfast. "Op the rigging" was his first order, and in that ordered tangle of knitting he had not only to find his way about at sea but find it in Swedish. (Reading as many of these books as I have it. has never occurred to me that even foreign ships would give orders and name rigging in anything but English!) The crew belonged to every nationality, and their polyglot language is retailed with relish. After this sort of language on deck, Newby goes back to the fo’c’sle, where ordinary conversation is of sevensea saltiness shot with the northern lights. The voyage out, the voyage homethis is another story, told with enormous zest and vividness of the stubbornhearted, horny-fisted simpletons who regarded shipping in steam as the last degradation. Eric Newby began as a wide-eyed ’prentice lad. After one long round voyage he has given us a lively and thoroughly ssailor-like story, complete with every detail of the Moshulu and three dozen exciting photos. N

Denis

Glover