Books: Salt-Water Dirge

THE WAY OF A SHIP (429 pp.) — Alan Villiers—Scribner ($6.50).

The full-rigged, deep-sea sailing-ship is gone, perhaps forever, and the man who mourns her most eloquently is Australia-born Alan Villiers. Anyone familiar with his earlier books (The Set of the Sails, Cruise of the Conrad) might suppose that Sailor-Author Villiers had unloaded his full cargo of grief and nostalgia, but not so. The Way of a Ship makes it clear that, after his seven trips around the Horn, sails will be flapping in his memory for life. A bit long on statistics, the book is nevertheless a fine armchair way of getting down to the sea in sailing-ships.

Here is the story of the Preussen, the great German five-master, “without a doubt the greatest sailing-ship the world has seen…a supership, a swift giantess among all sailing-ships, the ultimate expression of deepwater Sail.” When all of her 30 square-sails were stretched, she presented 60,000 square feet of canvas to the wind.

This beautiful “gesture of defiance flung at the mechanical age” met the fate of many a lovely sailing-ship. In 1910 at the mouth of the English Channel she was rammed by a “blundering steamer,” was so weakened that a subsequent gale broke her back and sent her aground.

Partisans of the American clippers may be surprised to find that the Germans produced not only the greatest ships but some of the greatest captains as well. To Villiers, once a skipper in sail himself and not easily given to hero worship, the giant of them all was Robert Hilgendorf, the “Devil of Hamburg.” No one ever equaled his skill at rounding the Horn, and there were plenty of sailing men who believed that he could control the winds with black magic. Hilgendorf himself did not care to press his skill; he quit at an early 50 to take a soft job ashore with an insurance company.

Villiers may be a partisan of sail, but he is no salt-sprayed sentimentalist. Sailing men may have loved their ships and their calling, but “it was first and foremost a source of employment, a means of livelihood. [The sailor] hated the sea as a savage enemy.” Says Author Villiers tartly: “It is landsmen who speak of ‘the call of the sea.’ ” The pay was wretched and the food was often worse. When steam brought hard times, many owners made up crews of teen-age boys who paid for the experience. One such crew of youngsters on the famed Cutty Sark got little but pea soup and “boiled salt horse” during a voyage of many months, and biscuits so hard that they had to be smashed with belaying pins.

What Villiers mourns is the passing of sailing as a great art, of sailing-ships as things of beauty, of deep-water sail as a moulder of character. “There was no other career comparable with it,” says he, ‘nor is there likely to be again.”