The Ships He Loved

The SET OF THE SAILS (292 pp.]--Alan Villiers--Scribner ($3.75).

At the age of eleven, Australian Alan Villiers secretly renamed himself after a sailor who had come to his father's house in Melbourne for dinner. To a boy who dreamed of going to sea in a sailing ship, Christian Christiansen naturally seemed a finer name than Villiers. As 45-year-old Villiers' autobiography shows, his feeling for sailing ships has never left him. His book is full of the names and the nearly human foibles of the ships he has known. It is also his tract for the times: sailing as the solution to man's troubles.

"Drive On, Good Barque." Villiers' first ship was an Australian barque, the Rothesay Bay, which, though loaded with gypsum and painted ugly grey, seemed to him "the very embodiment of romance and sea adventure." The crew was drunk when the voyage began, Villiers turned green-grey as she rolled over the sea, the mates cursed him for blasted uselessness. But Villiers had made up his mind. He recalls how he felt: "The rain had eased a little, and from the main t'gall'nt yard the streaming deck of the old barque seemed slim and almost clipper-like . . . Spiritually I felt nearer the Creator of things on the high yards and astride the bowsprit-end than I ever had felt ashore. This was the life! Drive on, good barque! I am where I want to be . . ."

Each year it became harder to find a job in sail. Villiers scoured Australia and Europe searching for the handful of such vessels (mostly under Finnish and German registry) that still crossed the seas. Once he was forced by sheer hunger to ship on a steamer--a harrowing experience which he describes with the revulsion of a habitual drinker recalling a month on the water wagon.

Back in Australia, Villiers got himself a newspaper job and a wife, but blandly dropped both when he had a chance to ship out (in sail) on a whaling expedition to the Antarctic. He found that he could make a living by sailing--and writing about it (Whalers of the Midnight Sun, Grain Race, Falmouth for Orders). By 1934 he had scraped together enough money to be able to buy his own little full-rigged ship. He renamed it after another enthusiasm, the Joseph Conrad.

To the Dhows. With the Conrad, Villiers began the great idyl of his life. He made it into a training ship for "all the young fellows who cared to come." Setting out from Britain, the 212-ton Conrad ambled around the world, touching New York (where a New Year's Eve squall grounded it and cost Villiers -L-2,000 for repairs), then around the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies, the South Seas and back by Cape Horn.

The voyage had cost him -L-15,000, and Villiers was broke. He had to sell his ship to a young millionaire.* He thought of the Joseph Conrad being converted into a pleasure yacht with chromium bathrooms. Villiers "hurried away to sail with the Arabs in their deep-sea dhows . . . for there are no chromium bathrooms in a dhow." In an increasingly mechanized and regimented world, sea-sailing was to Alan Villiers a remnant of free and individualized life. He is its loving mourner, singing its nostalgic swan song.

*Who later turned it over to the U.S. Maritime Commission, which used it as a training ship in World War II.

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