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FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE MAST
orWhat am I Supposed to do with all These RopesandWhy is this Person Yelling at me?
 
Click on picture to enlarge
 
Mackerel skies and mares’ tails make tall ships carry short sailsWhen the sea-hog (porpoise) jumps stand by at your pumpsSeagull, seagull, sit on the sand; it’s never good weather when you’re on the land
 
In the film
Master and Commander 
, the HMS Rose was used as the main ship.
Actually, there was a time when I would have found such quaint sea lore asquoted above extremely interesting; unfortunately, this is not the time.Although the lines are for some reason running through my head, I am far 
 
too otherwise engaged to enjoy them. In what is a dream come true, I am atthe bow of a three-masted "tall ship," a "windjammer," a "square-rigger," analmost exact wooden reproduction of a 24-gun British frigate, the
 HMS  Rose.
The replica I am standing on was built in Nova Scotia in 1970 to sail duringthe American Bicentennial; the original was built in England in 1757 to fightin the French and Indian War and to eventually bottle up American towns,destroy American ships, and stop daring Rhode Island smugglers once andfor all. She did her job well; partly in response to her power, the Americans began building their own navy.Yet, just as nature-lovers belatedly learn that Henry David Thoreau forgot tomention
 
bugs
, lovers of tall ships belatedly learn that people who write pretty paeans to the sea forgot to mention
 seasickness
. And so what I amdoing at the port bow of a frigate on a storm-tossed sea somewhere off LongIsland is what seamen often refer to as giving back to Neptune what Neptunedemands; i.e., I am throwing up for the eighth - yes, 8th - time in thirty-sixhours. In between such pleasantries, I have to continue working the lines andsails as well as pull my watch including tricks as helmsman, bow watch and boat check.It is just as well that I continue to work on deck because on my hard mattresscot in the compartment, where sleep is impossible, I hear the loud,monotonous, nausea-inducing sloshing of the sea within the bulkheads andexquisitely feel the sway of the boat. Make that:
 swaaaay
of the boat. And,sure enough, none of the versions of 
Mutiny on the Bounty
be it with Clark Gable, Marlon Brando or Mel Gibson suggests for a second that there might be a problem of that nature. In such films there is no need for Dramamine, patches behind the ear or accupressure on the wrist. So much for Hollywoodand
mal de mer verite
.Fiction written on life at sea is, at least, far more realistic. For example, inC.C. Forester's
Ship of the Line
a very seasick Captain Hornblower reflectson how he hated "the indignity of seasickness as much as he hated themisery of it. It was of no avail to tell himself, as he did, despairingly, whilehe clutched the rail, that Nelson was always seasick, too, at the beginning of a voyage."****************************
 
I had wanted to sail on a tall ship both for researching my novel set in 1857Hong Kong,
 Hangman’s Point 
, as well as for the thrill of a lifetime I knew itwould be. I soon learned that the ship was based in Bridgeport, Connecticut'sCaptain's Cove Seaport and that, yes, I could sail on the
 Rose
, but as their 
Manual For Sailing Aboard The American Tall Ship Rose
makes clear:
There Are No Passengers on the Rose!
I would, in time, learn what an understatement that was.By the time the day for my boarding actually arrived, I had already managedto buy my rigging knife and marlin spike, my small but powerful flashlightwith lanyard, foul weather gear including a slightly ridiculous rain hat, oldclothes (which would soon be full of tar from the standing rigging of theship), insect repellent and binoculars.I took the train from New York City to Connecticut, grabbed a cab, and tenminutes later, I was boarding the ship. I could see the "blue peter" flyinghigh, the flag with a white rectangle within a blue background which meant:"All persons should report on board as this ship is about to proceed to sea."Being part of this tradition sent a thrill through me and I thought of thesailors over the centuries as they prepared to leave the safety of a port and toonce again take their chances with what Joseph Conrad accurately describesas the "unconcerned immensity of the sea."At first glance, it looked as if pirates must have attacked the ship shortly before I arrived. The mainmast course yard was missing, the mainmastt'gallant yard was lying on the weather deck and cannons and piles of ropewere strewn everywhere. The course yard, I would learn, had been lost in a50 knot gale off Nova Scotia and the topgallant (t'gallant) yard would bedaringly replaced at sea. An expertly performed cleanup soon cleared thedeck and had the
 Rose
"all shipshape and Bristol fashion" and ready to leave by noon the following day.My second surprise was the number of people joining the ship. Duringwartime, there had been 160 men on board the
 Rose
to both sail the ship andman the cannons. During modern cruises there are up to 49 people on board.What I found was a crew of about 14, myself, and one other person who.like myself, had joined for the four-day journey. Apparently, by boarding inMay, I had come aboard before the popular season for coming aboard had begun.
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