A sailor’s life – 29. Friend or foe, 1917

Pass of Balmaha, later the German auxiliary raider Seeadler

The German sailing ship raider See-Adler had started life as the US-flagged Pass of Balmaha, a Clyde-built full-rigged three master only seven years older than Monkbarns herself. She became a player in the war in 1916, when she was stopped by a Royal Navy vessel north of Scotland patrolling Britain’s blockade of German ports, and ordered to Kirkwall for examination of her cargo.

Even though the ship was neutral, and bound for Archangel on the White Sea with cotton from Texas for an ally, Russia, the British blockade was rigorous. Neutral America was still trading raw materials with Germany and every item on the waybill had to be scrutinised. Under British interpretation of international law, German goods were not to be traded, and Britain impounded anything of potential use to the enemy – or indeed itself – deaf to the protests of her trading neighbours.

The British patrol put half a dozen marines aboard Pass of Balmaha, to ensure compliance with its orders, hoisted the Union flag and left. But they were no sooner out of sight than Pass of Balmaha was stopped again, this time by a German U-boat. As the guns on the grey conning tower appeared, the ship’s American officers hurriedly raised the stars and stripes and hid the compromising British guard in the hold, but the enemy lookout has seen the flags change. Suspicious, the German commander ordered the ship to Cuxhaven, putting aboard a single officer armed with a hand grenade to ensure they did so.

In Germany, the British marines were discovered in the hold and the ship was seized.

Pass of Balmaha turned out to be just what the Kaizerliche marine had been looking for. A sailing ship was a good bleating goat in the shipping lanes, but it also avoided the fuelling problems that dogged the coal-hungry turbine-driven raiders. The vessel was fitted with diesel auxiliary engines, guns, and bunks for 400 prisoners, and she had slipped out into the North Sea the previous December with stolen Norwegian papers, commanded by Felix, Count von Luckner.

Count Felix von Luckner, the Sea-Devil

Von Luckner was a flamboyant character, reputed to have run away to sea himself at 12. He had served seven years in sail on ships of various nationalities, including British. When See-Adler’s false identity had to be changed at the last minute, he simply gave the papers a realistic splash of sea water to blur the forgery, and set off to run the enemy blockade with a Norwegian-speaking crew on show and a deck load of timber concealing the gun emplacements. He put up portraits of the Norwegian king and queen in his cabin and was even reported to have dressed one of the crew in a wig and frock, and settled “her” cozily over some domestic chore in a dark corner of the master’s quarters. When a British armed cruiser intercepted them southwest of Greenland four days out, the Norwegian ship with the shy wife was allowed to pass.

By March 1917 as the former banana boat, Mowe, was putting into Kiel with 800 prisoners at the end of her second raiding voyage around the Atlantic, Von Luckner had made his way down to the latitude of Rio. On the way he had sunk eight sailing vessels, including one on which he was reported to have himself served as an able seaman, and three steamers, which he got within range of his guns by various ruses, including pretend fires on board.

However, success brought its own strains: he had collected 203 prisoners and feeding them was becoming a problem. Instead of sinking his next victim, therefore, he cut down her masts and packed all the captives off aboard her, together with one of the British captains to navigate and enough provisions to reach Brazil.

Bert Sivell's postcards from Montevideo, 1917

Then he made himself scarce, heading south for the Horn and escape into the Pacific, to wreak havoc there, although he hove to briefly off the Falkland Islands – to say a few words and drop a large iron cross marking where Vice Admiral Count Von Spee and his men had died at the hands of the British navy two years previously.

Monkbarns had arrived in Montevideo after a passage of 47 days right through Von Luckner’s war zone to learn that every warship in the Atlantic was now gunning for a three-masted square-rigged commerce raider much like, or indeed very like Monkbarns.

Read on: For those in peril on the sea
Previously: Monkbarns or See-Adler?

A sailor’s life – 28. Monkbarns or See-Adler? 1917

Monkbarns

Monkbarns left Barry Roads, in the Bristol Channel, early in February 1917, racing under full sail behind another British-registered ship, the Mount Stewart. As they drew out of the lee of Wales, the strong northeasterly wind freshened to a gale and the seas grew wilder. The steam sloop escorting them struggled to keep up as the old “windbags” flew along at 14 knots (think racing bike), neither captain fainthearted enough to shorten sail, as the sloop’s RNR commander – himself sailing ship trained – noted appreciatively.

Lewis Watkins, one of eight apprentice boys in the half deck that trip, remembered passing a torpedoed Norwegian tanker off Lundy. The naval escort, wallowing in their wake, her bridge and foreward gun blinded by the sheets of flying water, had peeled off in relief to deal with the wreck. “Proceed independently,” she had signalled to her charges. “Safe voyage and good luck,” and with an answering flutter of their own flags the sailing ships had stood away on their separate courses.

It was the middle of the first world war and aboard Monkbarns they had swung out their lifeboats in case of attack and posted the best watch they could manage shorthanded, Watkins recalled. Other than that there was nothing to do but make their way with all speed past Fastnet and out into the Atlantic, beyond the reach of the submarines. They were bound for Montevideo, Uruguay, with coal from Cardiff.

Three weeks later, John Stewart & Co’s Galgorm Castle was stopped and sunk by an enemy submarine 90 miles west of Fastnet. The crew got away in two lifeboats, one of which, with the captain and his wife, was picked up by a passing steamer the following morning. The captain’s wife, who had borne and raised two daughters aboard her husband’s ships over 16 years, went straight back to sea, was again sunk by a submarine, and amazingly both she and her husband survived the war. But the mate’s boat was not found until ten days later. Only one man in it was still alive.

German raider See-Adler – the former Pass of Balmaha

Within four months of the loss of the Galgorm Castle, four more John Stewart ships had been sunk and by the time Monkbarns dropped anchor in Montevideo on March 25^th news of a new enemy in the Atlantic was trickling ashore: a sailing ship raider was reported to be at large, menacing shipping with a hidden engine and guns.

A disguised former banana boat, the steamer Mowe, had slipped the British blockade of Germany’s ports the previous year – and claimed 15 ships, including John Stewart’s Edinburgh, but See-Adler, as the Germans called their new auxiliary cruiser, looked particularly unthreatening.

Indeed, she looked very much like Monkbarns, which would become a problem.

Read on: Count Felix von Luckner’s See-Adler
Previously: Captain Donaldons’ tribulations

Lost at Sea – 82. The sailmaker’s tale

Monkbarns at sea, October 1925 – the Old Man (Captain William Davies), Ian Russell AB at helm and ‘Sails’ Robertson, private collection E. Bainbridge

One of the rare surviving photos of everyday life aboard Monkbarns shows a handsome man in a cap and leather waistcoat sitting on a low bench on the aft deck surrounded by folds and billows of canvas. His tools and twine are laid out in a neat “housewife” beside him, and both hands are busy as “Sails” looks up from his work to smile at the camera.

The master perches on the saloon skylight nearby in jacket and bow tie, having insisted on changing into his good shore-going gear for the occasion. In the background, a youth at the wheel studiously minds the sails overhead. The sea is calm and the sun is high.

Henry Robertson was 70 when the image was recorded in 1925 by the ship’s final English apprentice, Eugene Bainbridge, who brought a fresh eye and a Leica aboard with him.

“Sails” was a grizzled widower from the east coast of Scotland. He liked his own company and staring into the middle distance with his pipe, the master’s son recalled*, and would recite chunks of Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem Marmion to himself whenever he thought no one was listening.

He had been at sea all his life, the son of the court clerk of Montrose who’d died when he was six, leaving the family to experience “what it was like to have the sheriff officer in the house to take away the clock to pay for poor rates,” as he put it.

Back in Scotland were four grownup children, three daughters and a son, born at five year intervals to the pretty housemaid he’d met at a dance in Montrose in his thirties. She had died of tuberculosis in 1907, leaving the baby to be raised by her eldest daughter and younger sister. “Sails” was devoted to them all and wrote frequently to his daughters, but he preferred to stay afloat.

Henry Robertson with his son and daughters in Dundee, 1920. Photograph private collection.

The girls concurred. A studio portrait from 1920 shows a handsome family, happy and relaxed around a proud father. But the girls were resilient and resourceful as well as beautiful; sea voyages were long and mails irregular, and for eight months after their mother’s death they’d forged her signature on their father’s allotment note, to keep receiving Henry’s pay and keep the family together. They also embroidered the truth a little locally, making out that he was a ship’s master rather than a sailmaker, and had run away to sea rather than follow in the footsteps of his stuffy town clerk father and grandfather.

In a letter written the year after his wife died, Henry describes being swept overboard in oilskins and seaboots that March during seven weeks of fearful bad weather south of Cape Horn and only narrowly escaping with his life by hanging onto the line he’d been repairing. “All I thought of when in the sea, ‘my bairns are Motherless now they are to be Fatherless’ – but God has had more for me to do, and saved me from a watery grave for a time.”

Ditton had endured “gale after gale, and the wind like to blow the old ship to pieces,” he wrote to his daughters. “I was in the sea a good while before anyone knew I was overboard, so when they did come to pull me up, I could not hold on so away I went again, I was so numbed with the icy seawater … The skipper says he never pulled so hard in his life as he did getting me on board.” The mountainous seas had also smashed the chart and wheel houses and carried away two of the lifeboats, he said.

Ditton – steel full-rigged ship built in 1891, sailed from Hamburg to Santa Rosalia, on the Pacific coast side of Mexico, in 180 days in 1907

It is an account that seems to offer little reassurance for 18-year-old Nell left caring for her three-year-old brother, but when Henry briefly attempted life ashore, his youngest daughter, Jean, later looked back on it as the worst two years of her life. The girls were used to doing things their own way, and Henry hated living on dry land. So back to sea he went. And at sea he remained.

He and Monkbarns were off Chile when the first world war began far away in Europe, and for five years they were kept busy carrying nitrates for explosives, and flour for troops – dodging enemy raiders and submarines and hunger and mutiny described elsewhere. In 1919, Monkbarns finally struggled home manned largely by apprentices. The old master and the young mate, my grandfather, quit. The “Old Man” – as masters are always called – retired to Australia, and Bert Sivell abandoned sail for oil tankers.

“Sails” hung on, and continued hanging on – patching and mending – as the ship and new young crew spent the next two years trying to beat steamers to peace-time cargoes. When Monkbarns was towed to Belgium in 1921 to be laid up alongside some of the world’s other surplus antiquated tonnage, “Sails” signed on as cook and bottlewasher. The master and mate were obliged to be aboard, but “Sails” was there, the master’s son wrote, “because he had no wish to be anywhere else”.

As the three tugs pushed and pulled them across the Channel in thick fog that September, Henry, leaning on the ship’s rail, puffing on his short black pipe as was his habit, will have passed the remains of HMS Vindictive still visible off the mole at Zeebrugge, and the deserted tangles of barbed wire in the sand dunes along the coast. Inland lay a lunar landscape of dead tree stumps, shell holes and trenches.

The U-boat shelters in Bruges, June 1919 – photograph: Australian War Memorial

Monkbarns came to rest in Bruges, seven miles from the sea, beside a row of concrete U-boat pens in an outer dock a mile’s walk and a tram ride from the great medieval cathedral and picturesque canals. Beside and behind her were three other laid-up ships, including Laeisz’s Perim and H. Hackfeld, confiscated from the Germans by the Allies as war reparations to the Italians. The ink was barely dry on the treaty of Versailles, ending the first world war, and around them Belgium was a wasteland.

Pretty Bruges itself, however, had survived the war largely unscathed as an enemy-occupied marine base, where German frontline troops came for brief R&R from the mud and blood of Ypres and Passchendaele, billeted on local families or in schools and churches. Officers of the Kaiser’s army came from miles around asking to see the town’s collection of Flemish Primitive paintings. The main damage was “friendly fire” from Allied attacks, parried by the new German Flugabwehrkanonen (Flak).

By Christmas 1921, there were lights and decorations, bright shops spilling light and warmth onto the cobbles, and fantastic chocolate confectionary too amazing to eat, according to Captain William Davies’ son, Ifor, who had arrived for the school holidays in the station cabbie’s horse-drawn landau. His mother and younger brother were already living aboard.

Ifor remembered fondly the warm welcome the Welsh family received from their “well-fed” Flemish butcher and his wife and daughter in the Grand’rue and the genteel patissier where they bought their bread, cakes and groceries. Mijnheer Lobrecht produced cigars for Captain Davies and thick slabs of chocolate for the children, while Monsieur Fasnacht – “a tall slender gracious old man with a sparse imperial beard and gold-rimmed spectacles” – conjured up steaming cups of hot chocolate.

At the moorings, too, a small convivial international community had formed, with lots of visiting. Captains Graziano, da Costa and Mazzoni poured mysterious drinks in tiny glasses and their wives introduced the family from Nefyn to ravioli. Communication was fractured, but no one minded.

During the summer, Sails could watch from the rail as the children played football on the concrete floor of the old German barracks, or rowed on the canal. Sometimes they took a trip on one of the barges plying the waterway to the sea, or helped local farmers picking fruit – returning with bags of fresh produce. In winter the dock froze, and they played on the ice around the ships until Mrs Davies called them in to eat. If the weather was bad, they hung around the warm galley, watching the old Scot prepare their meals, or huddled in the sail locker to watch him pushing the big needle to and fro through the mountains of canvas with his leather sail-maker’s palm.

Laid-up or not, the work of mending the standing rigging and patching and “roping” the sails – sewing on hemp bolt-rope edges for strength and identification – continued.

Arbroath on the east coast of Scotland, immortalised by Sir Walter Scott in The Antiquary as “Fairport” (Private postcard)

Monkbarns spent 16 months in Belgium but Henry was only lured ashore once, on Christmas Eve, and then only came out of courtesey to Mrs Davies because, as her son put it, “he was a gentleman”. Mostly he kept himself to himself, refusing invitations to join the family in the saloon and settling instead in the warmth by the galley stove with his pipe. He was a keen reader with a rich booming voice, and loved to recite to himself for hours on end. He knew by heart enormous stretches of narrative poems like Marmion and The Lady of the Lake (“Where shall he find, in foreign land, so lone a lake, so sweet a strand…”)

“Most of the time, we respected his privacy,” Ifor recalled. “But once in a while Dick [the mate] would tempt us after supper to leave the saloon and tiptoe towards the galley so that we could hear Sails. If we knocked at the door he would courteously invite us in, tell us to make ourselves at home, and then, without a trace of self-consciousness or condescension, continue where he had left off.”

To Henry, the works of Sir Walter Scott were not merely pleasant recreation but also a link with home. Monkbarns is the main character in Scott’s third Waverley novel, The Antiquary; a well-to-do collector living in an ancient house Scott based on Hospitalfield, Arbroath, the leprosy hospice founded in the 13^th century by the monks of Arbroath abbey. Scott had stayed there as a guest. When Sails signed on with Monkbarns he gave his address as 24 Allan Street, Arbroath.

The ship Monkbarns was one of three commissioned for a prominent local canvas manufacturer. He named them Monkbarns, Fairport (as Scott called Arbroath in the novel) and Musselcrag – the abbey’s old fishing village, Auchmithie.

Steam-powered shipping was already cutting the demand for sailcloth by 1895, when Monkbarns was launched, but there was still a living to be made in sail, where the wind was free and labour cheap, and Arbroath was a mass of saw-tooth factory roofs and chimneys to prove it.

Charles Webster Corsar could have invested in steamers to bring in the Russian flax his factories needed, but the last surviving son of the weaver with the vision to buy James Watt’s engine chose instead to build sailing ships, and with a wry flourish he named them after a historical romance.

Newspaper cutting from 1925 with Monkbarns ‘old-timers’ Sails Robertson and the ship’s cook, Josiah Arthur

Monkbarns’ cook, Josiah Arthur, photographed by Eugene Bainbridge. (Copyright)

A newspaper cutting from 1925 again shows Henry Robertson sitting on Monkbarns’ deck surrounded by canvas, now with the ship’s black cook, Josiah Arthur, posed beside him. The journalist describes them as “the knight of the needle and the cracker-hash king … survivors of types the world will soon know only in history”. There was hardly a square foot of Monkbarns’ canvas that had missed Henry’s palm and needles in 14 years, he wrote, and Arthur claimed to have cooked more cracker-hash, dandy-funk, and lob-scouse than any ship’s cook left in active service.

‘“No steam-boats for me, massa,” said Josh of Jamaicy,’ runs the toe-curling prose. ‘“I’ve always been used to serving out lime-juice and trimming salt-junk, and at my time ob life, massa, I don’t feel like turning on ham and eggs and peaches and cream for steam-boat sailors.”’

The crew list for that voyage reveals Josiah was in fact from from Barbados not “Jamaicy”, and that Henry had sheared ten years off his age. He still looked good. He could get away with 60.

Four years later, however, the old Scot was dead. Captain Davies, too, was dead, probably of stomach cancer. He fell ill on what was to be Monkbarns’ final rounding of the Horn and was buried in Rio. Monkbarns herself had limped back to the UK only to be sold for a coal hulk. The boy with the camera failed his sight test and never sailed again.

Monkbarns sailmaker Henry Robertson and his leather sailmaker’s “palm”, in the Signal Tower Museum, Arbroath

After a lifetime at sea, Henry Robertson finally went home to his children and grandchildren, and he lies buried with his Kate in Sleepyhillock cemetery, Montrose.

His sailmaker’s palm, a last tangible link with the ship, sits on a glass shelf in the Signal Tower museum in Arbroath – beside one last view of Henry surrounded by billows of canvas, stitching in eternal sunshine aboard Monkbarns.

 

*J Ifor Davies, Growing Up Among Sailors, 1983