At first the toughness of the life at sea, the violent discipline of the mates and the rough ways of the crew shocked Villiers; but one day he woke up rejoicing to be afloat, doing work that he learned to love. with men's lives as well as the ship's hanging in the balance under the indifferent lights of the city. The Conrad's stranding had been a reminder, almost a symbolic foreshadowing, that even in the home precinct of a sophisticated, mechanically supported civilization, the wildness of the world is still our there, as is the need for courage and resolve in people who would be doing things in it. Other rough moments were to come on the voyage, after the little ship had romped through the Trades in flying fish weather and come into the great winds of the Southern Ocean. From there she slanted up into Indonesia, in the wake of the Portuguese explorers of the 1500s, and finally stood away for Villiers's native Australia. In Sydney, the skipper was welcomed home as a native son. Tourists crowded the ship, with dignitaries and-most welcome-sailors in the grain trade, a trade still carried in a fleet of big square riggers sailing from Australia's south coast each year. And there were veterans from the halcyon days of the Australian wool trade, carried half a century earlier in fast wooden clippers of superlative design, even a few who'd sailed in the splendid Cutty Sark, Thermopylae and Cimba, ships whose names were once known in every port and which live on in legend today. Villiers reveled in the reception, but he worried that everyone viewed the Conrad's voyage as a kind of spectacle or exhibit. Unthinking visitors walked off with belaying pins from the pinrails. No one offered any help to the voyage, or rook Villiers up on his noble idea that Australia should have a square rigger to train young people in the ways of the sea, to open their eyes to the wider horizons and stern realities rhe early seamen had mastered ro course the world's oceans and, indeed, settle Australia. The marine artist John Allcor, however, was a welcome visitor. He brought with him young Oswald Brett, who was to become a notable marine artist in his own right, and a friend of Villiers, in later life. Later, when the ship reached Melbourne on the south coast, he had another visitor he was to see more of, a young Australian girl named Nancie Wills who came to hear Villiers speak at the Melbourne Shi plovers Club. They were to meet again in England during World War II, and after the war they married and settled in Oxford, England.
"Here Nobody Gives In" Voyage finances were shaky when the Conrad came into Melbourne, after a wearisome bear down the coast from Sydney. There was just £30 ($150) left in the till, which went our immediately to meet port charges and provide shore-leave money to the crew. Villiers had other resources. He could, and did, write stories for the newspapers, give lectures, sell his photographs, and draw against royalties from his books, but none of them were enough to meet the real costs of the voyage. He reproached himself for not having allowed for all the unforeseeable incidents of the voyagethe catastrophic costs of the stranding in Brooklyn, the extra costs of shipping home a seaman who couldn't fir in aboard ship, doctors to treat malaria picked up in the East Indies, things beyond the normal wear and tear on sails and gear. Bur then he thought: Well, I knew all this when I set our .... Bur I had beenwell, almost inspired to buy this ship. So far as I knew, no one else would have saved her from the break-up yards; no one else would have made any sailing-ship available for British 10
youth, no one else would have tried to sail this lovely ship round the world. Besides the beauty of this stout little vessel of 1883, with her deep single topsails, sharply steeved bowsprit and look of a frigate of bygone centuries-what besides this had inspired him? Ir was the boys he'd shipped, making up half the ship's complement of 28 souls who kept that inspiration alive. The other half were seasoned square-rigged sailormen, whom Villiers paid. The fees paid by the boys accounted for less than one sixth of the voyage cost-bur they were the heart of its purpose. I believe Alan saw something of his own life experience in these youngsters. Alan had grown up in modest circumstances in Melbourne, where his father , a man of considerable parts, a poet and pacifist, worked on the city trolleys for a living. Alan was inspired from childhood by the sight of the sailing ships that clustered in the harbor, linking Melbourne to the world as they had for centuries, and by an English reacher who believed in him, a Miss Sweetman whom he never forgot. Ar age 16 he went to sea in the small bark Rothesay Bay. His father had died three years earlier, leaving the family nearly penniless. To get his mother's permission to go to sea at age 16, Villiers reminded her that he would be one less mouth to feed. So Villiers went to sea, in an aging bark running short-handed in the inter-island trade carried across the stormy waters linking Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania. At first the roughness of the life at sea, seasickness, uncertainty, the violent discipline of the mates and the rough ways of the crew shocked Villiers; bur one day he woke up rejoicing to be afloat, doing work that he learned to love. And he found mentors among the ship's company, who, with all their grousing, rook pride in their work. With that pride went a contempt for manipulators, con artists and people who give something less than full value. The septuagenarian second mate Jack Shimmins rold him: "Never trust the shore bastards: they'll do you in if they can." In the Rothesay Bay the going was hard, bur there was no fakery-rhere wasn't room for it. And there was respect: respect of course for the wild, untamable sea, and for the ship, whose service was demanding. A senior deckhand said: "Here nobody gives in. No, my sons, not to anything." Summing up this sailing years later amid the green fields of his home in O xford, Alan wrote: "Here in the battered bark, all men mattered." Villiers went on to sail in the great square riggers that carried grain to England and Europe up until World War II. He wrote a book about life aboard these big steel barks, each carrying around 5,000 tons of grain. A film followed and he went on the lecture circuit. Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society in the US invited him to speak to a large assembly in Washington, and a successful speaking tour followed . He was recording and speaking for a vanishing way oflife. As he later wrote in his preface for our book about the Wavertree in South Street Seaport in New York: Their windships might kill them but while they lasted they were challenging, beautiful, noble ships in whose service there were tremendous compensations and satisfactions gone quire beyond achievement now. Due to the peculiar economics of the grain fleet, one of the big ships, the Parma, came on the market for only £2,000 ($10,000).
SEA HISTORY 91 , WINTER 1999-2000