Sailing Ancient Seas

1 End of Season in Turkey

Historia (Inquiry); so that the actions of of people will not fade with time. It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.

Herodotus The Histories

In 484 BC Herodotus, the ‘father of written history’, was born in ancient Halicarnassus in what is now Bodrum on the coast of Asia Minor in present day Turkey. Herodotus stands apart as an early writer because of his ability to arrange his material systematically and to look critically at his sources. He was surprisingly free of racial prejudice and his appreciation of the personalities he wrote about and his awareness of the foibles of human nature elevate his writings over and above most earlier and many later writers. He travelled to many places in the known world before he returned to Halicarnassus, though crucially he also relied on others accounts of places he hadn’t been to. He was not to stay in Halicarnassus and left after disagreements with the Dynasts to spend the last years of his life in Thuria in Italy.

It’s October 1994 and the end of the season in Turkey. I leave Bodrum Marina at six in the morning before anyone is up on the other yachts and head out of the harbour for the short motor across the bay to haul Tetra in a nearby boatyard, one I have used often in the past. Everything is a dull grey and quite unlike the Mediterranean blues of the sea and sky of the summer. Bad weather is on the way and it feels like rain. At the boatyard I have to squeeze Tetra into the concrete pen that the travel hoist straddles to pluck the boat out of the water. It’s always a nervous time getting the boat in on your own, going astern to stop the boat in the middle and rushing to throw lines ashore to secure it fore and aft. Making sure that the slight slop rolling into the pen doesn’t push you onto the rough concrete. Murat the travel hoist driver sees me coming in and shouts to the yard lads who run down to the hauling bay and push Tetra off, tie up lines, go through the morning chorus of greeting me.

merhaba (good-day) nasil siniz (how are you)

ee teshikir ederem (good thank you) sen (you)

ee teshikir ederem (good thank you).

The yard sits at the edge of the sea, that fabled summertime blue and turquoise water. Most of the trees have been left and boats are planted under olives, pine, and tamarisk. The lads here are mostly from poor communities in the south and east of Turkey. They live in the yard in a small dormitory and get two meals a day as part of the deal and I have no idea what they are paid, I know it is not a lot, but it is more than they can earn in the east.

Ziyah, the yard shipwright, wanders over. He is a local Bodrum man with a house and a family who has been building and repairing boats here for more than thirty years. First the local sponge and fishing boats, then the yachts that started to arrive in the 1980s. He looks at Tetra and I wince when he pulls out his knife and starts digging bits of rotten wood out of the hull and knocking out other parts of it with the hilt of his knife. I almost tell him to stop attacking my boat. I know the hull is tired and there is some rot, but how bad it is I am only just going to find out. Ziyah doesn’t speak very much English and in any case he doesn’t talk very much at all. He is a big strong man, forearms used to carrying planks of wood around and a barrel chest built on work, not in a gym. He communicates in grunts and harrumphs, and when he wants to address you his dark brown eyes are unwavering, as if sizing you up and assessing your worth.

Boat choc fener (very bad).

He digs in the wood again and mutters something to Yusuf, the yard manager, who has joined us.

Yusuf is the urbane one, a nuclear physicist who has taught in Germany and MIT in the States. He speaks excellent English and German and when he returned to Turkey he sailed here in an old wooden 26 foot Harrison Butler built in the 1930s. He has his heart in boats, but he also has some driving ambition to succeed in the country he left, to make money, to be liked, despite his unpredictable and explosive temper hinting at some hidden Aspergers in his make-up.

Yusuf looks at the ground and tells me that Ziyah thinks the hull is finished. It’s dead. Ziyah needs to strip some of the planking away - with your permission.

Only after that can Yusuf tell me what the whole story is, whether we can repair her. Whether it’s worth repairing her.

Tetra is the boat I’ve sailed on, lived on, worked on for the last fourteen years. She is not big, just 31 feet long and an old fashioned 31 feet at that. She is narrow and has fine ends so the accommodation inside is limited. When you go down the cabin steps there is a small galley to port with a sink, two burner stove, and some lockers for stowage. On the other side is the chart table, a standing-up job, and a quarter berth running back under the cockpit, though it has been used for stowing things for years. The saloon has a six foot long sofa on either side of the folding table which are the main sea berths. Forward is the toilet and the forepeak with a double berth that curves to a point at the bows. This has been my home for months and at times years. Some people never get used to living in such a small space though you only need to go outside to the cockpit to find all the space you need hemmed in by just the horizon and the sky.

She is also stunningly beautiful. When she is out of the water the curves of her hull have a sensuality to them that I need to run my hand over and wonder at. I have sanded and filled and painted this boat every season for fourteen years. We are bonded this boat and I. We have sailed through good weather and bad all around the Mediterranean. I have cooked countless meals on board and so often settled myself into the cockpit to watch the sea and the sky in the evening that I have dulled the paint where I lean back against the main bulkhead. I know every inch of her deck and can walk it blindfold to check on the anchor, murmur to the girl to tell her I think she is wonderful, glance around the decks to make sure everything is as it should be.

I think of Tetra at anchor just a few months ago in the winding fjord- like inlet at Gokkovar Limani 120 miles north. You need to wend your way down to the bottom of the narrow inlet and then anchor with a long line ashore to hold the boat in one position so it doesn’t swing around onto the shallow rocky shelf right at the end. It seems like an age and like the start of this grey weather it had presaged bad things to come from the start.

Odile, my French wife, had come out for two short weeks and I had picked out this mini-fjord with its razor-backed rock sides and a hot spring bubbling into the sea as the sort of place she would like. Maybe the sort of place she would fall in love with me again and we could get on with our lives. I needed her to feel the romance of living on the boat again, as we used to a few years ago, I needed to woo her with the help of Tetra and the surroundings and my attentiveness. But Odile had wrapped herself up in her melancholy and a need to do something else other than sailing on the boat and living with me, something for herself, something to salvage her own sense of being. At the airport as she leaves she whispers in my ear. It’s over.

I sailed away and washed as much of the encounter off as I could with the spray and noise of the meltemi driving me down through the Dodecanese to eastern Turkey. I sailed the boat hard to wash it all away and I pumped the boat constantly to keep it afloat. Ziyah was right, this boat had some serious problems and the hull was leaking badly whenever I pushed her hard.

I left Turkey and Ziyah still chipping away at Tetra in the yard and flew back to England. Back in London in my little flat in Tooting with a view over Tooting market I wake to the sound of trucks pulling up to unload fruit and vegetables, sides of meat and frozen chickens, cheap groceries and cheap costume jewellery, discontinued lines of clothes and shoes and whatever a stall-holder can sell. Times are hard for the market stalls in this forgotten suburb of London. It’s only claim to fame is that Daniel Defoe is supposed to have lived here during the plague years, when it was a village on the outskirts of the city far enough away from the festering corpses of the plague victims in London city. Now it’s a commuter suburb on the Northern line, though in ways it still is a village despite the traffic thundering through it in and out of the real city. And it has some of the best Indian restaurants in London.

I turned the answer-phone on in the flat and settled in with a bottle of whiskey, Hemingway style. Somewhere I had read or watched in a movie that this was what any maudlin man would do in a melancholy funk. Every now and then the phone rang and messages were left on the answer-phone, but I didn’t reply to any of them. It’s nearly Christmas and I’m going through the ritual of trying to get drunk and feel really sorry for myself. The problem is I don’t like whiskey, it was the only bottle of spirits in the flat, and I’m not a lone drinker. I give up after half the bottle is gone feeling not very drunk and no better. On Christmas day Richard rang. This old friend, an archetypal English bachelor, is worried and that doesn’t happen often to matter-of-fact-Richard. In fact showing any sort of emotion is pretty much foreign to him.

I know you are there. Pick up the phone. Pick up the bloody phone.

I don’t answer and two hours later the doorbell rings. Richard has driven up from Chichester to check up on me in my self-imposed bubble of melancholy. Words tumble out and I swear he is just nodding to some nonsensical babble because I can’t really understand what I’m saying. We drink a lot of whiskey, he has brought another bottle, and I finally achieve some sodden state of drunkenness where the smell of the whiskey has wiped away the smell of my despair.

What you need is an adventure. You need to go sailing, he says knowingly, since he is one of those who reckons I only become a complete human being on the boat. You need to write about all that ancient boat and navigation stuff you are always going on about. Just write a book about it. You know the coasts and islands and currents and winds better than anyone. Write that book about ancient stuff.

It planted a seed and on Christmas day I start pulling out various books on ancient sailing craft, on ancient routes, on trade between the ancient ports and cities. Somehow my attention strayed from my Mediterranean to the Red Sea and down to the Indian Ocean. The mysterious Indian Ocean. When did navigation start on this sea? It must have been linked to the civilizations around the Mediterranean. I started looking out books to consult and books to buy. Richard was right. This sort of stuff, researching and adding the practical aspect of sailing in a small boat on these seas, what he called my ‘ancient stuff’, was my forte and my melancholy started to slip away. Now all I need to do is find out about the girl in the boatyard in Turkey and whether she can be rebuilt.

2 The Idea

NP 64

RED SEA AND GULF OF ADEN PILOT

Suez Canal

Gulf of Suez and Gulf of Aqaba Red Sea

Gulf of Aden; south-east coast of Arabia from Ra’s Ba Ghashwah to Ra’s Junayz

Coast of Africa from Raas Caseyr to Raas Binna Suqutra and adjacent Islands

PUBLISHED BY THE HYDROGRAPHER OF THE NAVY

The contents of Admiralty Pilot NP 64.

Numbers NP 38 West Coast of India Pilot, NP 21 Bay of Bengal Pilot and NP 44 Malacca Strait and West Coast of Sumatera Pilot make up the set for the northern Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean had an attraction many years ago when in 1976 I sailed Roulette down to the Mediterranean. I wondered then whether I could sail this fragile 20 foot boat down the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean. I even bought Admiralty Sailing Directions NP 64, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot to research the voyage. As it happened I became happily marooned in Greece and the idea faded, though perhaps it was always there waiting to emerge when I needed it.

As an ocean it sits shyly between the two big ones, the Pacific and the Atlantic. These are the two that get all the attention and whose history we can guess at: Magellan and Drake, Raleigh, Cook on Endeavour and Bligh and his mutiny, Darwin and the Beagle. These explorers all travelled over the waters of the Indian Ocean, but you would hardly know it from the history and geography we inherited. In popular history this ocean is a bit of a wallflower, a damp patch that explorers hurried through after the really big adventures in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Even our perceived ideas of getting away from it all are organised around images of the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. Whoever said they were going to escape to Chagos or to Madagascar. Granted the Seychelles and Mauritius have some popular recognition, but Gauguin went to Tahiti and the Caribbean is the popular honeymoon destination.

The Ocean also has a bit of a sinister psychogeography. Sandwiched in between Africa and India it seems divorced from the western world: a bit too Muslim and Asian and African with no soft European edges. Australia, the great white continent on the eastern edge has only a small population along the edge of the Indian Ocean, a sort of token gesture by Perth while the main effort in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, is directed towards the Pacific rim. For voyagers it is always associated with piracy and there is some truth there. Around Indonesia and the Malacca Strait in the east and the Red Sea and Socotra in the west, there is a real threat of piracy to craft large and small. Somehow we can accommodate cocaine smugglers and their fast boats in the Caribbean as latter-day Blackbeards and Miami Vice has made the drugs scene in Florida almost homely. But cutting crews throats in Socotra or throwing crew overboard in the shark infested waters of Indonesia seems darker and more villainous than the dashing piracy of the Caribbean.

Then there is the Red Sea, the narrow corridor connecting the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. It too has a menacing psychogeography with the Arabian Peninsula on one side and the dusty states of the Sahara on the other side. Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are not names that conjure up an easy geography or a welcoming culture. The images are of a guttural language, strange and secretive cultures, a sea fringed by reefs and cultures removed from easy access.

Sitting in London surrounded by books there is a vicarious thrill to reading about these seas and peoples around them. There is no threat, no nightmares in Tooting. Conrad’s cursed sea and Lord Jim’s fall from grace are words eliciting a hair or two on end, but nothing that a glass of shiraz can’t dispel and leave buried in a vague and unsatisfactory lump of unease. Whereas for Jim, abandoning his ship and a hold full of pilgrims, altered his life forever.

He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again.

Armchair exploration has no gut level experience to it, no adrenaline surge and just a few butterflies to a commitment not yet under way. If anyone asks me what I’m doing my answer has been honed to: ‘I’m heading down through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea, but don’t think I’ll go any further’. I’m not a gung-ho sort of traveller and even after sailing for years I have a fear of the unknown and not a lot of confidence about my abilities. I dive into to these things trying not to think too much about what is entailed and only when the reality and hardness of the sea bites into my psyche and my body do I wonder how I could have arrived at this place.

It wasn’t long before I was awash in a sea of charts and pilots and books for the Indian Ocean trip. The Catalogue of Admiralty Charts and Publications, a huge spiral bound poster-sized book, NP131, is my guide to sorting out what I need. I comb sections H and I for the charts: H1 covers the Arabian Sea, H3 covers the Red Sea, I covers the Bay of Bengal and I1 Sumatra and the Malacca Strait. I feel like a latter day Sinbad the Sailor with all the advantages of satellite navigation and electronic instruments, though I’m sure there be monsters still out there.

Along with the charts I need are the dark blue cloth-bound volumes of sailing directions, the Admiralty pilots for the areas I am going to: NP64 Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot; NP 3 Africa Pilot Volume III; NP 38 West Coast of India Pilot; NP21 Bay of Bengal Pilot; NP 44 Malacca Strait and West Coast of Sumatra Pilot; NP 39 South Indian Ocean Pilot. These volumes are the hoary issue of the reports from merchant ships and naval surveys that were compiled in the mid-19th century and have been updated from ships and small craft passing through these waters ever since. The language is often dry and abstract, but from the starched language you get a taste of the countries visited by the captain and crew of ships that sailed in these waters far away from the safe havens of empire. On Socotra the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot tells us that:

15.26 The trade of the island is small, ghee and aloes being the chief articles of export. It is carried on by ‘bagalas’ from the Arabian coast. They arrive in January with coffee, rice and other articles, which they exchange for ghee, aloes, orchilla weed, etc., which they take to Zanzibar, bringing back coconuts and piece-goods. They dispose of as much as possible, returning to Arabia with aloes, dragon’s blood, blankets, etc. Money is taken in payment for goods supplied, but barter in kind is usually preferred.

Dragon’s blood and orchilla weed sound like something from a Medieval manuscript. Dragons blood turns out to be the resin of the East Indian Palm used in some medicines and orchilla a red or violet dye derived from lichen.

In the Admiralty tomes