Adventures in the Trade Wind

Richard Dey

Description

This is at once the biography of an Englishman who became the pioneering charterboat skipper of an American yacht, and a history of the charterboat business in the islands. Morris Nicholson’s story reflects a time now all but vanished in the islands, beginning when they were neglected colonial outposts and a single yacht meant income for the islanders. In no other book is there an account of how skippered yachts, bareboats, and headboats came to sail the Caribbean Sea and became an economic sector. However it is Nicholson’s story—and his stories of others—that drives the narrative and fills it with human interest.

Sujets

• Special Interest
• Travel
• Adventure

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 20 août 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781462821631
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Also by Richard Dey
 
Selected Bequia Poems
 
Loss of the Schooner Kestrel & Other Poems

Morris Nicholson, Hill House, Bequia, 2000
Photo by Sarah Huntington

ADVENTURES IN THE TRADE WIND
 

 
The Story of Morris Nicholson,
Pioneer Charterboat Skipper,
and of Yacht Chartering in the West Indies
in the Half Century after the Second World War
 
 
RICHARD DEY
 
 

OFFSHORE PRESS 2009
 
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Dey.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2008911423
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-4363-9437-6

Softcover
978-1-4363-9436-9

eBook
978-1-4628-2163-1
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
 
 
First Edition
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 07/20/2022
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
543461
OFFSHORE PRESS
Weymouth, Massachusetts
 
For my father and mother,
Richard Addison Dey and Ruth Morris Dey
Contents
Illustrations
 
1     Cruise of the Enid
2     Among the Windwards
3      Eleuthera II in Europe
4     Hanging Out in Vigie Cove
5     Caribbean Circumnavigation
6     A Very English Harbour
7     Out of Grenada
8     The Purchase of Hope
9     On Charter
10   Among the Grenadines
11   Out of Bequia
12   At Hill House
 
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Frontispiece: Morris Nicholson, 2000
The Eni d, Falmouth, England, on the eve of her departure, 1951
Lunch on the Eni d, Falmouth, England, 1951
Morris Nicholson on Smuggler’s Row, Tangiers, Morocco, 1951
Bert Ganter with unidentified yachtsman
The Nanin, née Speejack s, hauled out for propeller replacement
Postcard of Port Elizabeth, Bequia, c. 1950
Postcard of Sunny Caribbee Hotel, Bequia, c. 1950
Rear panel of Nicholson yacht detail folder showing accommodation plan of Eleuthera II
The sketch Eleuthera II under sail
Schooner Zaca
A donkey used to drive the mechanism with which wells were pumped or boats were hauled out on a railway in the Balearic Islands
Vigie Cove, Castries, St. Lucia, c. 1954
James Charles, crewman, and Jaime Tur Mari, cook, Castries, c. 1954
Eleuthera I I in Rio Ozama, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Front panel of Nicholson yacht detail folder: Schooner Mollihawk
Flica II departing English Harbour, c. 1957
The ketch Ring Andersen
St. George’s harbor, Grenada, c. 1974
The banana boat Geestcap e, St. George’s, Grenada, with the schooner Jacint a alongside
MV Xebe c, likely the first motorboat in the charter business
The Nicholson brothers, Morris and Peter, c. 1966
Yachts at anchor, Fort-de-France, Martinique
Eleuthera II , at anchor, English Harbour, Antigua
Jaime Tur Mari in the galley of Eleuthera II
Shelling dredge
Gus and Jane Koven, Hope House, Bequia, 1976
Damage to the cockpit of Eleuthera II after a rogue wave struck off the coast of Columbia
Eleuthera II and Eric and Susan Hiscock’s Wanderer IV in Admiralty Bay, 1976
Admiralty Bay from the foreshore
Hill House under construction, 1983
Suzanne Walker at Hope House, Bequia, 1983
The bones of the Westcountry trading ketch Eni d, Windward, Carriacou, 1974
 
The seaman looks out over the sea as the farmer looks out over the land. There is meaning in everything: the long swell running in under little wavelets, the gulls hovering over the riffle, the paling of blue water to green, the patch of white off the rocky headland. There is never a sense of monotony, even though there can come a sense of great fatigue, of wanting to get away from the sea, that cruelest of taskmasters and most capricious of mistresses. There is always the underlying tension that comes from fear; any man who knows the sea has known fear—not necessarily the fear of death, but the fear of an ordeal that has to be undergone to be understood, the battle against a tireless and impersonal foe. Occasionally the sailor does put the oars on his shoulder and walk inland until a curious native asks their purpose, but soon he is trying to pawn them to speed his way back to the coast. No man who loves the sea can ever know peace unless he can look out over water, even if only from the shore.
—Carleton Mitchell, Islands to Windward
1 Cruise of th e Enid
It is the bliss of ignorance that tempts the fool, but it is he who sees the wonders of the earth.
—Frederic A. Fenger, Alone in the Caribbean
H e was standing on the deck of a local schooner, destitute after the English ketch he had crossed the Atlantic in had been sold out from under him. He had sailed overnight from Martinique in the schooner and stood on the level deck watching the harbor come into focus in the fresh morning light. He knew he was more or less in the middle of the Lesser Antilles, the crescent-shaped archipelago that stretches six hundred miles between the Virgin Islands and Trinidad, dividing the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean Sea, but he did not know anything more. Why should he? An early morning rain had fallen on Castries. Destitute as he was in the schooner Colombie , he was nevertheless cheered, he recalls, by the “total din” of the peepers and the scent of flowers that seemed to come with the morning light, as the local vessel tacked easily and silently into the harbor. At least in Castries, capital of the British colony of St. Lucia, he could speak English. In his pocket was two hundred dollars U.S., or about one-fifth of his investment in the ketch Enid . The money was in the form of traveler’s checks, already signed in the two places, by whom he forgets.
“This practice was quite common; no one worried about identification in those days,” Morris says. A cat jumps onto his lap as a pause in the music comes with one disc changing to the next.
“On the beach in St. Lucia?” I ask. We are sitting on a veranda, on a succession of January days and nights over several years, shielded from the sea blast by a spray of bougainvillea. Up from Hope Beach, five hundred feet below, comes the muffled roar of the surf, waves driven in from the open sea by the trade wind and breaking on the shelving shore. A green glass fishnet float, found washed-up on Hope Beach and hung from a beam overhead, sways in the trade wind that drove it west over the open sea. We are looking out over several small islands in the Grenadines, one of which, lit up like a cruise ship and populated by the rich and famous, was little more than a fisherman’s camp when Morris, not unlike the glass float, turned up on the beach.
A thin smile crosses his ruddy face, lights up his pale blue eyes. “I was supposed to be sailing around the world!”

Morris Nicholson was working as a draftsman in a large electrical engineering firm in Ipswich, Suffolk, when a friend dropped a copy of the magazine Yachting Monthly on his desk. “Nick, what do you think of this?” he asked, showing Morris a small classified ad. It was the spring of 1951.
“‘Crew wanted to participate in purchasing a boat for a proposed round-the-world cruise,’ it read, or something like that,” Morris recalls. “No details at all were given, of course. It must have given an address, though, for a response.”
His friend, Derrick Hills, was quite enthused over the ad but was engaged to be married, so his interest was strictly imaginative. Morris, on the other hand, studied the block of small type, which was about the size of a train ticket.
One morning Morris motorcycled up to London from Woodbridge, where he was living, and found his way to Chelsea. The ad had struck a chord in him, deep and hidden. He had written the Stevensons, who had placed the advertisement, and they had written back a four-page, handwritten letter about their idea. Everyone who responded got the same letter explaining the deal, which was £350 ($1,000 U.S.) for the voyage around the world, with a £35 down payment. His parents had suggested he go meet them.
The Stevensons lived in an ordinary house in a quiet area. It was a two-story, red-brick row house, one of five. All were similar with little fences and gardens in the front, and a large garden in the rear. “We sat and talked for three hours,” Morris recalls. “Eileen always had a cigarette dangling from her lips and her hair looked unwashed and she was shabbily dressed. Clive was a well-built, small man with a beard, and while he did not look like a navy man, he spoke knowledgeably on marine matters. They both smoked like chimneys and Eileen was a vegetarian. We had quiche and red wine for lunch, which was served outside in the rear garden under an apple tree. They were Bohemians. Although there was no studio in the house, I saw the tall pottery pitchers they made throughout the years for the first time,” Morris says, glancing toward one now on top of a cupboard. “I had never met artistic types before. Despite their appearance, I was excited by the idea of the voyage. I knew I wanted to go. Suddenly, the hum-drum life of being an engineer seemed pretty dull.” A Mozart piano sonata fills the veranda air.
It is likely that he made the £35 deposit then and there. On