Read Online A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby by Eric Newby - Free Book Online

of my dentist I had brought with me in anticipation of such an emergency. It had looked easy in Wimpole Street when he demonstrated how to do it: he put a little vaseline on a plugger, heated the gutta-percha and popped it in the hole. Now, overcome with wine and food, in a swaying ship, by the murky light of a hurricane lamp I felt like a tipsy surgeon about to perform a major operation. Worse still, the patient kept flinching and I dropped a blob of bubbling hot gutta-percha on his tongue. He leapt into the air screaming and three boys had to hold him down while I tried to push a cooler piece into the hole. But it would not stay in, and I gave him an overdose of aspirin and hoped for the best. The operation had not been successful.
    Pipinen, the other casualty, had cut his hand badly while opening a tin of apricots and Karma, the unpredictable Finn, was fixing it with fathoms of bandage. Hilbert told me that Karma would not cut the bandage because he had bought it for himself. When I left, Pipinen’s hand was as big as a football and Karma still had yards left.
    I went in search of my bunk. It was 9.45. By some miracle I was neither ‘rorsman’ (helmsman), ‘utkik’, nor ‘påpass’. I crawled into my bag and slept dreamlessly until four in the morning, when a voice cried ‘resa upp’; but Sandell closed the curtains and I slept on until half past seven. There were loud cheers when I woke. I had slept ‘like sonofabeetch, like peeg in straw’. Ten hours – the longest sleep I ever had in
Moshulu
, or anywhere else. I was quite thrilled.
    On Christmas morning the weather was cold and brilliant. Big following seas were charging up astern in endless succession. They surged beneath the ship, bearing her up, filling the air with whistling spray as their great heads tore out from under and ahead to leave her in a trough as black and polished as basalt except where, under the stern post, the angle of the rudder made the water bubble jade-green, as if from a spring. From the mizzen yardarm, where I hung festooned with photographic apparatus, I could see the whole midships of
Moshulu
. On the flying bridge above the main deck the Captain and the three Mates were being photographed by the Steward, solemn and black as crows in their best uniforms.
    Rigid with cold I descended to eat Christmas dinner, for which the ‘Kock’ had made an extra sustaining fruit soup. For breakfast we had had Palethorpe’s tinned sausages which were very well received; at ‘Coffee-time’ apple tarts and buns but not enough of either; and for supper, rice, pastry, and jam. At four a.m. on what would have been Boxing Day in England we were setting royals once more. The party was over.
    Eighty-two days out from Belfast we anchored in Spencer Gulf in south Australia, having sailed 15,000 sea miles. We were three months in Australia. At first sweltering at anchorage waiting for a freight to be fixed, so that we could load a cargo of grain somewhere in Spencer Gulf, which runs up into the heart of the wheat belt, then, when hope had almost been given up of fixing a freight for any of the ships, and we had visions of sailing home in ballast or being sold with the ships like a lot of slaves, all the ships got freights and
Moshulu
was ordered to load a cargo at Port Victoria on the other side of the gulf at £1.37½6 ($6.34) a ton – in 1938 she had loaded nearly five thousand tons at £2.06 ($10.30) a ton. The Spencer Gulf was a hell of a place, wherever you were in it in summer, plagued by flies and an appalling wind as hot as a blast furnace which poured down through it from the deserts of the interior, causing
Moshulu
and other ships to drag their anchors. To go ashore, we rowed and sailed eight miles to Port Lincoln and eight miles back. I found a lot of letters waiting for me and I sent my parents a telegram which read ‘Muscular, happy, penniless’ and got some money by return.
    We sailed from Port Victoria at 6.30 a.m. on 11 March 1939,