of the crew to leave the ship, because her small brown dog, who had also been with us on all our travels, had already been sent off home from Sydney. He was travelling in luxury now in a cargo ship, spending most of the time in the bunk of one of the apprentices. We hoped to be back in time to receive him when he came out of quarantine.
To replace these two members of the crew we now had John. We had first met him in San Francisco, where we found that he also was bound for New Zealand, and like us had sailed down from Victoria in British Columbia. He was sailing single-handed in his little Laurent Giles-designed yacht, Trekka, which he had built himself, with great skill, in Victoria. We planned our trip across the Pacific together, and for a year now we had seen much of each other. When the two yachts lay together at the various anchorages and ports we made, John used to come on board for meals, and he would put on weight in port and take it off again as quickly during his single-handed passages. When he heard that Clio was going back to school, and that we would like to have a shot at the Horn if we could find a suitable crew to come with us, he said that he’d lay up Trekka in New Zealand, and come along with us. Nowhere could we have found a better companion.
Before climbing down from the wharf on to Tzu Hang’s deck, I had a good look at her, but I could see nothing that wanted doing now. She had been fully fitted out in Sydney, and spruced up again on her arrival in Melbourne, and she had had a good testing on her way down. She is a 46-foot ketch, 36 feet on the water line, 11 foot 6 inch beam and drawing 7 feet. She has a canoe stem and a marked sheer, and her bowsprit follows the line of the sheer so that it has a delicate upward lift, and she seems to be sniffing the breeze and eager to be off. The truck of her mainmast is 51 feet above the deck, and her mizzen 35 feet and she carries 915 square feet of sail. She is flush decked, with a small doghouse, 5½ by 5½ feet, separated by a bridge-deck from her self-draining cockpit, which is only 34 by 34 inches. She was built of teak in Hong Kong, copper fastened and with a lead keel of just over seven tons, in 1938, and she was shipped home in 1939. We bought her from her first owner in 1951, and sailed her back to Canada.
I let myself down on to the deck by way of the shrouds and went below, and I found Beryl and Clio sitting together in the main cabin opposite a stranger, an Australian and, I supposed, the man who had been helping her with the water.
‘Hullo,’ she said to me. ‘Here you are. This is my husband. I’m afraid I didn’t quite get your name——’
He introduced himself. ‘How d’you do,’ he said. ‘I just came down here to take a snap of the Britannia from the wharf here——’
‘And Beryl put you to work,’ I interrupted.
‘Too right she did, and I’ve been working here ever since. I tell her that there’s many a firm here would snap her up, for labour management you know. She’s been telling me about your trip. Sounds very interesting. I wish I could come with you.’
‘As long as it’s not too interesting.’
‘It might be at that. It can be quite tough even round here. I do a bit of sailing here. Tasman race, but crewing, not my own boat. Which way are you going?’
‘Well we thought we’d go straight across and through the Banks Strait, and then right down south of New Zealand, and then across keeping just about north of the limit of icebergs or floating ice. We’d go south of the Snares here and north of the Auckland Islands, and south of the Antipodes Islands.’ I showed him the route on a weather chart.
‘It’s a long way south,’ he said. ‘Have any other yachts been that way?’
‘Well one or two have been round the Horn, or through the Straits of Magellan, but I think they’ve all been up to Auckland first, so that our route will be a good bit further south than the others.’
‘Well I’d still like to come along, but anyway I’ll not say goodbye now, because I’m going to pick you all up in my car on Wednesday and drive you to the airport. I hear you are off to school in England,’ he said, turning to Clio, ‘I wonder how you’ll like that after all this sailing.’
The tea was made and the kettle was hissing pleasantly on the galley stove, but he wouldn’t stay. ‘The first time I’ve ever known an Australian refuse a cup of tea,’ I remarked, but he said that he’d have tea with us on Wednesday, and off he went.
‘What a nice chap!’ I said to Beryl. ‘How did you pick him up? Good show fixing a lift to the airport.’
‘Oh, he just came along and asked if he could give me a hand. He’s brought gallons of water. And when I told him that Clio was leaving on Wednesday, he said that he’d been longing to give someone a lift as an Olympic gesture, and that we were the first non-Australian visitors that he’d been able to pick up. I don’t think that he’s taken a photo of the Britannia yet.’
We sat down to tea. ‘You really ought to have been at the Games,’ Clio said, ‘it was such fun.’
‘I don’t think that I’d ’ve enjoyed them very much. Besides they look so like the school sports to me, and you know I hate school sports. I think the umpires are the best part. They look so funny all dressed up in their little blazers, and they go trooping after each other in single file, looking exactly like a string of cormorants, and when they sit on those steps one on top of each other, they look even more like cormorants, sitting on a rock. Anyway Pwe and I have enjoyed ourselves, and I’ve made a new rack for the saucepan lid.’
Beryl’s carpentry suffers from her preference for using up an old piece of wood rather than throwing it away, but all the same she is a very enthusiastic and determined carpenter, and was always making something about the ship. The cat was sitting on her lap, her eyes closed and her ears pricked, and her tail lashing gently at the mention of her name. Her eyes opened now, a deep clear blue, as the ship stirred and someone stepped down on to the deck.
‘Here’s someone who always knows when tea’s ready,’ said Clio as John came down below. He was tall and fair, and filled most of the cabin door, so that Beryl had to squeeze past him to get to the kettle.
‘What do you think of my saucepan rack?’ she asked, pointing it out to him.
John is a carpenter, or rather an artist in carpentry. He looked at it, and then patted her on the shoulder. She looked quite small beside him. ‘Pretty good,’ he said, and I saw that she was pleased with the praise from the expert.
The remaining days before Clio left went all too quickly, and almost before we knew it we were standing disconsolate on the airport, watching an aircraft climbing away from the end of the runway.
‘She was better than me, when I left my Mum in South Africa,’ John said, ‘I couldn’t see for tears and fell down the gangway.’ And after a moment’s thought he said, ‘Still she didn’t really know what she was doing, did she? She kissed me too.’
‘I think she had a pretty good idea,’ Beryl said, and we all laughed.
Later, when we were back in Tzu Hang, I said to Beryl, ‘Do you think she’ll be worried?’
‘Worried about what?’
‘Oh, about us and Tzu Hang, you know, when she’s not there.’
‘No, I don’t think so. As a matter of fact I asked her and she said she wouldn’t be.’
‘Good heavens. Why on earth not?’
‘Don’t be so silly. You don’t want her to worry, do you? She said that she reckoned that Tzu Hang would look after us.’
‘I hope she does.’
‘Who? Clio or Tzu Hang?’
‘Clio—or rather, both.’
In the wharf shed on the south wharf there was a small room with a telephone, which we were allowed to use. This was Beryl’s operations office, and she sat there in blue jeans and a checked shirt, ordering immense quantities of stores to be delivered