The Lonely Sea and the Sky by Sir Francis Chichester Read Free Book Online

I never had a fight, and I attribute this to the boxing match early in the voyage that had been keenly watched by both trimmers and stokers. Besides the crew wanting as big a share as possible of any food going, there were also the cockroaches and weevils. I tried various dodges to keep the cockroaches off the plate and mug in my locker. My best catch from one biscuit was three weevils and two maggots. I was not the only person exhausted. In the watch after ours, a big Swedish trimmer said that he could not go on watch. There had to be a full complement below and one of our watch had to take his trick for him. A second time one of our trimmers did his trick for him, but when he declared a third time that he was unfit to work, our watch was not having any more of it. They dragged him out of his bunk, and beat him up with their fists. They seized him by his legs, and dragged him along the alleyway to dump him down the ash chute into the hold. These chutes were shafts, just big enough to haul up a sack of ashes from the stokehold for dumping over the side of the ship. The man looked a ghastly sight being dragged along with his head bumping on the steel floor, and his face covered in blood. I had a feeling of shame that I did not come to his rescue, but I knew that if I intervened they would tell me to do his trick for him myself, and I was at the end of my endurance. Perhaps my mates were better psychologists than I was; the Swede suddenly jumped to his feet and, thrusting his attackers aside, ran down to the hold. I was told later that he worked harder than anybody else on his watch.
    Â Â Years later, when I was on a passage from Kobe to London in a P&O steamer after I had crashed in Japan in my seaplane, one of the engineers there turned out to have been seventh engineer in the Bremen . He told me the subsequent history of my trimmer watch. Of the seven who started the voyage, only three got back to England. One had deserted in Durban; one disappeared in very suspicious circumstances on the passage between New Zealand and Australia; one had been killed by a blow on the head from one of the long clinker slicing bars; and a fourth had been hanged for murder.
    Â Â I got my discharge in Wellington, New Zealand, and drew £9 in wages for the three weeks' work. My ticket was endorsed 'Very good' for sobriety and two other virtues.
    Â Â Ned Holmes, my New Zealand soldier friend, got me a job at ten shillings a week with the manager of a farm outside Masterton, belonging to his father. Old Maxwell, the manager, was a big chubby­cheeked man, with a bushy moustache, and was considered a great man with sheep. I lived with the family, which consisted of Maxwell, his wife, and their daughter, a sweet little thing of about seventeen, called Olive, whose name somehow exactly fitted her face.
    Â Â Old Maxwell gave me the sack after three weeks; he said that with my bad sight I would not be able to spot the ewes when they were cast on their backs in the spring, when heavy with lamb, and unable to get up unaided. As a matter of fact, my visual accuracy with spectacles is not too bad; for instance I once shot two hares with two shots of a .22 rifle, the first was 145 yards off and the second, which bobbed up when it heard the shot, 95 yards away. Also, I shot five rabbits on the run one morning with a rifle, so I was not sure about Maxwell's reason for getting rid of me.
    Â Â I got a new job on a sheep station 38 miles from Masterton. There was no town or township (village) nearer than Masterton, and there were just two of us to look after a farm of 2,000 acres, with 3,000 sheep and about 200 head of cattle. I was in the saddle most of the day, riding round the hills attending to the sheep. When we were mustering a paddock, of which there were three, we would start off from the station house by moonlight at three in the morning. We worked the sheep steadily off the hilltops and down to the bottom of the paddock, where the