Stormie Seas: An Unfinished Saga By Peter Throckmorton Curator-at-Large, NMHS Aegean and Scandanavian ideas went into the design ofthis latter-day caique, and her career has reached from secret service missions to marine archaeological work. Here her owner, having brought her from the Mediterranean across the Atlantic under sail to Antigua this spring, begins to tell her still continuing story. The Germans invaded Greece in the spring of 1941. That winter, people were dropping dead in the streets of starvation. The Italians, who came in the German wake after their own unsuccessful attempt to invade the peninsula, lived off the land. Thus Greeks were anxious to leave, to say the least; some merely to escape starvation, others to fight the invaders. The Greek islands were almost entirely supplied by small sailing vessels. Some, even then, were auxiliaries, although most had been built as pure sailing ships. The Germans could not commandeer them all, since the precarious life of the islands, and a lot of the mainland, depended on them. The caiques then ("caique" means only a boat, in Greece; the most common type is the trehandiri, a double-ended boat a third as wide as she is long, with depth a third of that) became the Greek road to freedom. Escaping boats usually ended up in Turkey, through a few reached Egypt where the English armies were. In 1942 a combined Allied unit, named the Levant Schooner Flotilla, was formed in Egypt to harrass, and it was hoped, eventually re-occupy the Greek islands. Authentic Greek schooners, fitted with modern diesels, and manned by mixed Greek, American and British crews, would 24
creep quietly among the islands. In 1943, a very bored Sub-Lieutenant in a Royal Navy destroyer on North Atlantic convoy duty saw a notice on a bulletin board, calling for volunteers with sailing experience. His name was Sam Barclay. He came from Norfolk. He volunteered and found himself in Alexandria, enlisted in the Levant Schooner Flotilla. He was immediately fascinated by the sailing ship types that crowded the several harbors of the old port. He was, and still is for that matter, a meticulous draftsman; he had dreams of being an artist after the war. His drawings are almost the only accurate ones extant of the exiled ships in harbor; the double-ended trehandiris and paramas, square-sterned raked-bow verhalass and caravoscaro, copied perhaps from fast American schooners that Greek blockade runners from Hydra and Spetsai and Psara had encounted during the Napoleonic wars in the south of France. He noted particularly the similarity of the trehandiri to the Colin Archer types of Norway: a hull with beam to length ratio of 1:3, with flaring bow and stern and long, lovely sheer. He dreamt of the day he would build his own boat on these lines. So, in Sam's mind, Stormie Seas was born. The war ended, and Sam went back to England to buy a sailing freighter for the Greek islands. He sailed her from Enland, a small black ketch, perhaps 70 feet on deck, named Bessie. I first saw Bessie working alongside the half-sunk wreck of a big Italian passenger liner, Giovanni Batista, in 1947. Her crew were salvaging the teak decks of the liner, and I rowed over and spent a happy afternoon backing
off the bolts that held the teak in place, until my Captain made me go back to work on the motor vessel I was in, and we sailed away. My heart was with the Bessie, and the dream boat sketches Sam showed me, and with the islands of the Aegean with their whitewashed houses ringing rocky harbors, and their hardy decent seafaring people. I did not see Sam again till the 1950s. The intervening years I spent a world away, mostly in the Far East. When I finally got back to the Greek islands I'd forgotten Sam and his schemes. One day, dreaming away a summer afternoon in the shade of a windmill in Mykonos, I watched a beautiful ship come into harbor. I ran down the mountain to the dock, and took her lines from a tall, vaguely familiar person. "Where did you getthis ship?" I asked. "I built her," he replied. It was Sam. He'd built his dream ship, with his partner John Leatham, in 1949 in Perama, the shipbuilding port of Piraeus, the seaport for Athens. He'd named her Stormie Seas. Sam dealt with his charterers, and we repaired to a nearby taverna where we talked and talked. He had found the last of the great sailing boat builders in Greece, Evangelos Koutalis. He and Uncle Vangeli had sat together and put the boat together, using Colin Archer underwater lines and making her a classic trehandiri on deck, with lumber scrounged from everywhere. The ship's frames were cypress and hard pine from a well seasoned pile set aside in 1939. Planking came from the same pile. Underwater she was fastened entirely with wooden treenails. Her decks were made from the teak we'd salvaged from the SEA HISTORY, FALL 1980