Sea voyages

Port Alfred in a Force 10 storm 3-4 days out from Brisbane crossing Pacific, January 1964






A disadvantage of living in Ottawa is that it's a long way from the sea. I really do miss the sea, and often reminisce (not out loud in boring monologues but in my thoughts) about several long sea voyages we had fifty and more years ago when going by sea was the customary and usual way to travel between Australia and the UK, Europe and North America. The voyage in 1954 from London Tilbury Docks to Adelaide was undoubtedly one of the high points of my life. We filled the ship's oil tanks at Tenerife in the Canary Islands then made the long haul down the west coast of Africa, past Cape Town on a sparkling summer day, and across the southern fringe of the Indian Ocean, all the way to Port Adelaide, 4 weeks at sea without a port. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope we sailed on the great circle route which took us well to the south into the Roaring Forties into a region of perpetual gale force winds (from astern) so we had high white-capped seas with a regular and pleasant pitch but no roll.

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John Last on board Adelaide Star, in the 'Roaring Forties' about midway between Cape of Good Hope and landfall off Kangaroo Island, South Australia, August 1954


Those southern seas were rich with marine life in (and before) the 1950s - schools of tuna chasing smaller fish, porpoises and occasional whales; once we saw a huge dead sea beast, perhaps a whale, perhaps a very large hammerhead shark, that was sliced into several pieces by the ship's propellors and in the ship's wake every sea bird for miles around descended to feast on the bloody remains. The skies were rich in sea-bird life too in those high latitudes: we weren't far north of islands north of Antarctica that are breeding grounds for skuas, terns and gulls. We had an escort of albatross, majestic creatures with a wing span of up to 12 feet, that kept company with us all the way from the Cape of Good Hope to landfall off Kangaroo Island. I've described in my memoirs how several of us on that ship caught an albatross one day, using the technique that Apsley Cherry-Garrard describes in his classic of survival, The Worst Journey in the World. Another long voyage took all five of us from Sydney to Brisbane, across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica where we unloaded several thousand tons of frozen goat meat before going on to Vera Cruz, Mexico, then up the Eastern seaboard of the USA to Charleston, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, Philadelphia (where I disembarked to fly to my new post in the department of epidemiology and community medicine at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont) and Boston, where Wendy and the kids disembarked. It was a wonderful voyage, about 5-6 weeks in all including several days in some of the ports, mostly through calm seas under sunny skies. We did have one wonderful storm at sea a few days out from Brisbane, with force 10 (over 60 mph) gales and mountainous seas that crashed into the ship from right in front of us. Fortunately I'm a good sailor, although the rest of the family and many of the ship's company and almost all of the 12 passengers were laid low. As a member of the ship's crew (I was the ship's doctor) I had access to the bridge and spent many hours up there, fascinated by the spectacle of the ever-changing vista of huge white-capped waves, like snow on hilltops. The photo above is one of many I took from my vantage point on the bridge during that storm in 1964. When we emerged from the storm after 2-3 days, we had calm seas all the rest of the way across the Pacific and no more rough weather until we struck a force 8 gale soon after we left Vera Cruz. The warm tropical waters were rich with life too, perhaps most spectacularly with luminous plankton that glowed in the dark moonless nights like innumerable little fireflies. I and the rest of our little family are very fortunate to have had these wonderful experiences of sea voyages. It's a pity our kids were too young to have clear memories of those travels that were so much more pleasant in every way than the air travel that has replaced sea voyages - just another way in which I think life has got less placidly pleasant during my lifetime.