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Tuesday 9 May 2023

Do Elephants Get Seasick?

Although not a mariner, I imagine that if you want to sail a ship across the North Sea from the Humber to the Elbe, from Hull to Hamburg, you set the satnav, and the autopilot and diesel engines do much of the rest.

It was not always so. Until maybe 50 years ago, you left the Humber on a compass bearing, made adjustments for the wind and tides, and hoped you ended up in the right place fifteen to twenty hours later. In winter, at night, in bad weather, it was not for the faint hearted. Lives were lost. What a risky venture it seemed.  

A while ago, in a post about family photograph albums, I showed a picture of my great grandfather as a newly qualified master mariner. He first went to sea on a ketch at the age of 13, carrying bathroom ware from Leeds to London and returning with broken glass. Later, he spent two years on a brigantine trading to South America, once sailing 900 miles up the Amazon to Manaus. But he always said that if a man can sail the North Sea, he can sail anywhere in the world. And sailing the North Sea is what he did for many years, as captain of ships from Goole in Yorkshire, Britain’s most inland port. Frequent destinations were Jersey, Ghent, Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg.

We still have some of his log books. Here is an account of a voyage from Goole to Hamburg on the 1,116 tonnne steamship Aire during the nineteen-thirties. The ship had a total crew of around 25.  

They left Goole Victoria Lock at 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening, and sailed out into the River Ouse. It may seem a strange time to leave, but it depended on the tides. “We would be off to sea  while the ship owners were dressed up singing psalms at chapel.” The ship’s crew, even the officers, were expected to touch their caps to the local landowner, Colonel Saltmarshe, if he was out in his grounds near the river as they sailed past. If not, he would complain that the ship had been travelling too fast and washing away the river banks, and the captain would have to appear before the shipping company Directors like a naughty schoolboy.

In a strong Westerly wind, but with good visibility between showers, it took four hours to reach the Bull Sands lightship off Spurn Point at the mouth of the Humber. Two and a half hours later, they passed the Outer Dowsing light vessel, moored in the shallow waters off the Lincolnshire coast (today the site of a proposed offshore wind farm). It was now 2.30 in the morning, with a strong westerly gale and heavy following sea, and there would be no further navigation aids until the Frisian islands some fifteen hours away. They set a course almost due East, and sailed on.

At 7.30 on Sunday morning, they sighted sister-ship the S.S. Blyth returning from Hamburg in the opposite direction. There had originally been three sister-ships, the third being the Calder which had foundered in bad weather on the same route in 1931, with the loss of all 26 men.  

Nothing more is logged until Borkum island light house off the Frisian coast near the Dutch-German border, which they sighted at 5.30 in the afternoon. Sometimes they would miss it, and have to look for the next sightings at Norderney or even Cuxhaven, eight hours further on. At Cuxhaven, they took on a pilot to take them into the Elbe estuary. It was now 1.30 on Monday morning. At Brunsbittel the estuary pilot made way for a river pilot, and they proceeded up the Elbe to Hamburg, mooring at No. 9 berth just before 6 a.m.  

The main cargo is not recorded, other than that it was sent by Rafferty and Watson of Sheffield. It was probably coal from the Yorkshire coal fields, the export of coal being the reason the port of Goole and its adjoining canal were built.

Also on board were three saloon passengers, three deck passenders, a horse, a dog and four elephants. Do elephants get seasick?

Presumably, the passengers and animals disembarked on arrival, but it was not until 48 hours later, at 6 a.m. on Wednesday morning, that the ship moved to the Altona wharf to discharge the final 675 tons, after which it moved back to berth No. 8. 

The return voyage began at 6.25 p.m. on Friday evening, carrying 275 tons of cargo and one alien passenger. They had a clear run down the river in good visibility, passing Borkum at 9.40 on Saturday morning and reaching the Bull lightship at 6.15 a.m. on Sunday. 

As usual, they moored briefly at Hull to discharge some of the cargo. Sometimes, my great grandmother or other family members would take the train to Hull and sail back up river on the ship. My dad did this a few times when young. My grandfather, as a boy, even went on trips overseas, on one occasion being gently pushed back into the cabin on becoming excited at the sight of foreign troops on the quayside at Rotterdam. “Look, Dad, Boers,” was not a sensible thing to shout in 1903.

On the current trip, vessels for Goole were held up at Hull by fog, and missed the tide, but they eventually arrived at 4.30 on the Monday morning, and docked three quarters of an hour later. They had been away for 9 days.

Click on maps to enlarge

21 comments:

  1. Fascinating and thanks for sharing Tasker. Do you happen to know which planet the alien passenger came from? As for your question, I put it into Google but the results were inconclusive.

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    1. The second sentence is exactly the comment I expected you to make, and it's Pollox.

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    2. Do you perchance talk Pollox?

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  2. Tough times for sailors in those days. I flew over the Humber Estuary going from Teeside airport to Amsterdam a few years ago. Although I was brought up in Lincolnshire and frequently went from Barton on Humber to Hull on the ferry (pre bridge days) looking down on the estuary made me realise just how huge it is. Our local beck flows into the Swale, then the Ouse and eventually into the etuary.

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    1. The Yorkshire Ouse is a river with no source and no mouth.
      When the Humber ferries were superseded by the bridge they ran pleasure trips up the river. I wish I'd done.

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  3. I'm so bold as to venture an opinion. I have done the run or similar many times as master and many more as deck officer. Before and after GPS. It would be near impossible for any school teacher but it's not that difficult for half bright properly trained folk.
    Much like colour correction, I remember telling you how to do that in five minutes but also recall you did bugger all about it. Nor did you ask how I done it. Not my problem, they were your shitty snaps.
    There are teachers and doers. Never the twain will meet. I've got the same problem now with CNC machines. That code is very hard. Can you help? I doubt it.
    Have fun.

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    1. You can't beat proper training. You would need to know what you were doing in the worst weather, and to have the confidence of the crew and shipowners. It took a long time to work your way up to master, especially to be a Humber pilot with a foreign trade ticket.
      Never had an opportunity to get into CNC programming. Have used lots of languages but they are probably not relevant.
      You will recall I had to drop the colour correction activity because of illness, but you gave plenty of pointers as to how to do it. Unfortunately, I can't see well enough to do it now, or programming (and they wouldn't let me anywhere near the bridge of a ship).

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    2. PS - are you still posting?

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  4. Roughly what year was your great grandfather born? It is your great grandfather you are talking about isn't it? I enjoyed the read and find anything about cargo at sea of interest. I am finding it difficult to date what you are describing though with the mention of 1931 in the midst.

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    1. He went to sea in the 1890s and the voyage was in the 1930s.

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  5. I enjoyed reading this. Yes, technology has really changed the world, hasn't it? I had a friend who ran away and worked on the many cargo ships of the Great Lakes. He was only 13, but a big and sturdy boy. No one questioned him. He went on to join the merchant marines later. He never returned back home. I don't know if he even kept in touch with his parents. He never spoke of them. I knew him as a very old man, but he never, ever lost that sense of adventure.

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    1. I wonder what he was running away from. I can imagine that for some, going to sea is a way of life that is hard to give up.

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    2. He never spoke of his family. He did marry and have 3 daughters, but the marriage did not last. He was seriously alcoholic by the time that I knew him, but he was affable. In the end, one of the three daughters called me when he was dying. At least one of them rallied around him, but he was gone quickly, and at his funeral a lone piper played at the side of the lake where his ashes were scattered.

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  6. Even with all state of the art technology on modern ships, I imagine it is still a tough way to make a living. But people who work aboard a ship would probably not want to swap with someone like me, confined to a desk and staring at computer screens for so many hours week after week.

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    1. I doubt you would sell it to them like that. A friend's father who went to sea and later became a meter reader was scornful of "office jobs".

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  7. This post reminds me of using the Humber paddle steamer ferry over half a century ago, long before the Humber bridge was built.

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    1. The Humber Ferries would be a fantastic tourist attraction these days. One was beached at Hessle for some years and used as a pub (The Lincoln Castle?). I watched the cables for the bridge being spun, which took a year or so.

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  8. Oops - my whole comment got lost!
    I think your post very interesting. The husband of a friend is pilot in Brunsbüttel - a heavy job. And when I am in the Netherlands at the North Sea, I often see memorials to dead sailors and fishermen - they (and their families) had a hard life.

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    1. Thank you. I check spam regularly and it wasn't in there.
      I liked at the Frisian islands on Streetview and they look wonderful for a seaside holiday.

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  9. 'Don't know about elephants but one of my mariner colleagues once told an entertaining tale of a constipated rhinoseros on board their ship. I have crossed the Northsea under sail a few times and recognize those descriptions and remember that feeling of trying to identify lights and find our way round Frisian islands. F

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    1. I would be hopeless with the lights as I have different colour vision to most people.

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I welcome comments and hope to respond within a day or two, but vision issues are making this increasingly difficult. Please note: comments on posts over a month old will not appear until they have been moderated.