Learning the Ropes

Publisher: John Murray, 1999 £ 22.50

Familiar to yachtsmen for "The Last Grain Race", Eric Newby has now published the photographs taken during his round-the-world voyage in Moshalu, a four-masted steel barque, in 1938-39. His introduction recalls fast passages made by earlier tall ships with cargoes of wool, nitrates and grain. Moshalu was built in 1904 on the Clyde. By 1938 she was owned by Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn in the Baltic. She sailed from Belfast with a polyglot crew in what was destined to be the last of the annual contests to make the fastest passage from Australia to Europe with a cargo of grain.

He describes Moshalu, and his emotions on being sent "Op the rigging", 198 feet to the mast cap, on his first day. Despite the rigours of life on board he regularly, when off watch, photographed the ship and her crew with affection and wit, and the eye of an artist.

The result is over 140 black and white photographs to a very high standard, linked by short evocative descriptions. They include pictures of Moshalu running before a force 11 gale, her decks and crew swept by great seas. The book is an historic document, a tribute to a vanished age and a visual treat. - MWE

Page prepared 14 June 1999