My Year Before the Mast

Annette Brock Davis

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780888822079
• eBook ISBN: 9781459714267
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1933, a young Canadian woman rejected the expectations of society and her upper-class family and became a crew member aboard one of the last great four-masted sailing vessels that still plied the ocean.

It was not an easy task. Young Annette had to fight pressures from her family, rejection from schools of navigation, and doubts from ship owners. When she finally found a berth as an apprentice seaman, she faced hostility from officers and crew, who grumbled that she should be home "raising babies." In the end, however, Annette won their respect, taking in sails, standing night watches, hauling and coiling ropes all the tasks the men were doing, with no concession to a girl's lesser strength.

My Year Before the Mast tells the story of Annette Brock Davis's life on the sea as the first female crew member of a commercial sailing line. Her courage and determination to break into a closed male world are central to this book, but we cannot ignore the fact that, while this is a book about a woman's struggle, it is also a book about the sea. Davis brings to life an era long gone, and introduces an incredible cast of characters the crew, officers, and passengers, each with his own foibles, humour, generosity, and flashes of meanness. But through it all, Annette emerges as the most remarkable character of them all.

Chapter 1 Getting Under Way

She lay at anchor in Copenhagen roadstead, her name reflecting from her bows in odd distortions of the word L’Avenir. Mist wove through the rigging, hiding her topmasts and muffling the drumming inside the barque’s steel hull. Down in her emptied coal hold, the knocking of hammers was deafening, and the coal dust was so heavy that the fog outside seemed clear by comparison. Two lanterns flickered, illuminating here a Slavic cheekbone and there a Viking jaw, but their smoke obscured so much that the form of a girl — me, that is — was indistinguishable among the dozen seamen chipping the rust.

For four hours the hammering had been striking through me as though it was the wave vibrations of the universe. Yet here in this black hell, I had found the world I had desired above all. Like the barque L’Avenir, I had been at anchor too long. Now we both awaited the wind that would sail us to Australia. For a moment, while realizing this, I let my weary arm relax so that it dropped to my side. Suddenly I felt a whack on my left hand.

“HA! You no goot. You stop verk.” A big Finn, an able seaman, seized my wrist, then flung back the cuff of my fisherman’s jersey to squint at the luminous dial of my Canadian watch. “Two hour mera nu,” he bellowed in his Swedo-English. The others did not hear his announcement of two more hours till knock-off time; all were isolated by oceans of racket on islands of their own thoughts.

How long was an hour to me? A moment, when reckoning the years in which I had endeavoured to sail in such a vessel. L’Avenir! Her very name meant “the future.” Now it was the present, September 21, 1933 (my twenty-third birthday), and this four-masted barque was outward bound to Australia.

L’Avenir trailed at the end of a line of sailing ships which for two thousand years had opened up the world to man through the sea-borne trade, from the coasters of the iron age to the clippers of the 1800s. Her owner, Gustaf Erikson, lived in the far away Aland Islands, which lie between Sweden and Finland. This remarkable shipowner had built up a fleet of twenty-three great sailing vessels, which he made pay when no one else seemed able to do so. Shipmates told me “Erikson can afford to lose a ship a year and remain solvent, as he carries his own insurance.” The ships, which had no means of propulsion other than wind power, carried grain, mostly from Australia to Europe. The long sailing voyage served to warehouse the grain, so that it arrived in time for the European markets.

What kind of a life was this going to prove, aboard for the many months it took to sail to Australia round the Cape of Good Hope, load up in Australia and return around the dreaded Cape Horn? In a few weeks we would be chasing the horizon across a lone and watery field of sea, with no wireless to use for communication and only signal flags in the rare chance of encountering another vessel. L’Avenir sailed outside of the lanes used by steam ships. If anyone fell ill aboard, the only chance of recovery might lie in the hands of the master and officers and the obscure contents of an old medicine chest. Unreal as such isolation sounds today, it was not too uncommon then. I faced this life aboard as the only woman in the crew, and a naive and inexperienced girl at that, brought up in a gentle and sheltered home.

From such a comparative life of ease, the work day at sea involved sixteen hours duty one day and eight the next. When not standing one’s turn as lookout, “police,” and wheel, one was employed in such heavy work as hauling on tackles, heaving up the anchor, or lifting tons of sail canvas as well as devoting long hours to chipping rust, coiling lines, and other piddling jobs. In addition, all hands might be called out in an emergency, and if required, work could continue for as long as three days and nights with only brief periods below for meals. After standing watches soaking wet, after hours of pulley hauly, one turned in too exhausted even to pull off sea boots.

As a young woman sixty-five years ago, I expected to endure pressures and prejudices stronger than those of today, as well as the normal hardships. Why did I choose such a seemingly unrewarding career, to be buffeted about not only by high seas, but by the unwelcoming attitudes of the crew? The urge to follow the sea had grown imperceptibly within me and I cannot recall the actual point at which I fell in love with it. My parents’ families were travelled. My father’s sister, when a hundred years old, related to me how as a three-year-old, I enjoyed looking at albums of travel postcards. The card I liked best, Vesuvio in Eruzione, showed the black volcano glowing brilliantly with lava. Aunt Lily asked me, “What would you like to do when you grow up?” She chuckled with glee, remembering how very solemnly and emphatically, for a three-year-old, I replied, “I am going to travel all over the world and I’m going to see the BURNING MOUNTAIN!”

Sea fever may have struck on a Canadian lake, when as child captain of a pirate crew in a rowboat with a window-blind sail, I dreamt of doughty deeds as a sea rover in West Indian islands. The story of the Black Buccaneer and also the true tales of pirates by Hyatt Verrill reinforced the vivid picture of a life of freedom and adventure.

The only block to such a good life was that I was a girl, but I soon tossed that disability off. I just became a boy in thought, word, deed, and dress, as far as I was allowed. If anyone asked, “Why do you behave like that?” I replied, “Why not?” with the simplicity of an overprotected child. This resolve to be a boy would be counted as superfluous today, when such a range of activities are open to girls, but I felt cheated, somehow, of the best that life held to make it meaningful. Surely, in the 1920s, it would not be impossible for girls to flout their restrictions and to break free like boys, at least for a time? My tales of eighteenth century sailors cited true cases of women disguising themselves as men and going to sea or to war as sailors or soldiers. There was Mary Read, for instance, who duelled with another pirate to protect her husband’s life, as he was not the swordsman that she was. I even planned to run away to sea, a plot discovered by my tearful mother, who mistakenly believed it was because I wanted to leave home, rather than because I wanted to become a worthwhile member of a ship’s crew in the glamour of the deep.

My incomprehensible desire to follow the sea could not have been excused on account of having a sea captain for a father, as did many a child born on the ocean in Victorian times. Such an involvement with ships because of an upbringing at sea would have been understandable. No, my father was a merchant, a minor one of what used to be termed the “Merchant Princes,” in the more picturesque earlier days of my native city, Montreal. Not that the term described my father in any way. He had dutifully followed the custom of those days and entered his father’s business after a prospecting trip to the Yukon in the gold rush days of ‘98 and a spell farming in Manitoba. He also maintained his interest in the Duke of York’s Royal Canadian Hussars — at the time a volunteer regiment — as their colonel. In World War I, he went overseas with the Sixty-sixth Battery. I believe he really preferred life as a farmer or soldier, or perhaps as a sailor, to life in an office.

The Brocks were collateral descendants of General Sir Isaac Brock, who commanded the British forces in Upper Canada in the war of 1812, gained the support of Tecumseh and the Indians for the British cause, and captured Detroit. At the cost of his own life, he repulsed the American invaders at Queenston Heights, now dominated by Brock’s Monument, a Canadian version of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, London.

My mother was an Englishwoman of the type that never seems able to settle well into an adopted country. Her father, Colonel Francis Dent of the Fifth Dragoon Guards, was such an excellent judge of horses that he had been commissioned by the British government to go to Canada as a remount officer during the Boer War. His wife and daughter, my mother Doreen, accompanied him on this trip. In Ontario, Doreen Dent met Reginald Arthur Brock, my father. His father, William Rees Brock, had been born in a log cabin, although a gentleman’s son of “an ancient English family” as it was described in those days. Through hard work and tremendous ability, Grandpapa had built up a large wholesale dry goods house, with warehouses across Canada.

When the young people became engaged, both the Dent and Brock families were not very keen on the prospects of this marriage, although it was welcomed on the surface. Both families shared the principles of loyalty to Britain, admiration of the royal family, the belief that under the Union Jack, British law was the fairest in the world and that the British were the finest people to govern their empire. But in the undercurrents of assessment, the Dents considered the Brocks dubiously, as being “in business,” rather than being landowners, or in the army or navy as was traditional. The Dents maintained this opinion, despite the provincial Canadian view that being a wholesaler held a greater cachet than being a retailer.

They concealed it, but the Brocks, a distinguished family, were irritated that a haughty, Indian Raj type of army family should consider them “common” because they were “colonials.” They were indeed colonial, in that two generations had been born in Canada, and before them, three generations had lived in Jamaica, where, in an eighteenth-century Jamaican book, they were described as “Doctors of physik and landed proprietors.”

Nevertheless, mutual aversion was curiously mixed with mutual admiration. Charmed by the elegance and personality of my grandfather, Colonel Dent, the Brocks found in him the ideal of the honourable Victorian officer. They admired the artistic talents of his wife, and the rare English beauty of their prospective daughter-in-law. And my father, who was ten years older than Doreen, was ready to settle down. But Doreen did not seem too sure of her mind, perhaps because of the family’s doubts about the “suitability” of the marriage, By the standards of her generation, Doreen was considered to be “spoilt.” What was called spoiled then compares mildly with today’s indulged moppets. When we were children, Mother used to tell us that, “When I was a little girl, when out driving I used to feel dreadfully sick with the swaying of the carriage. But my mother told me, ‘Never mind. Your father likes you to go out for afternoon drives with him. So you must stand that feeling of sickness, and do make sure you don’t vomit’!”

Mother was a very shy, nervous young woman. Her eyesight was so poor that she had to wear glasses. When she was about to be presented at court, her mother insisted that she take them off, even though they were only pince-nez. “They look so ugly and you are so awkward anyway. You must not be seen like that.” Poor Doreen had to fumble her way up to the throne to make her difficult curtsey to the Queen. Harsh as this may seem, it was in the interest of bringing mother up well, and making possible a “good” and presumably happy marriage. Grandma was doing her duty as it was seen in those days.

When Doreen became engaged to my father, she was taken on a trip out west to Banff to be given time to think about her forthcoming marriage. On the train returning to Toronto, Doreen nearly told her mother that she really did not want to marry. “But I was so afraid of my mother and all the arrangements having been made, I held back and never told her how I really felt,” she told me later. Hardly the beginning for a blissful marriage. Its effect may have induced me to regard marriage as binding rather than freeing and turned me into a roving rebel. Who can say?

When they married, Reginald was given the warehouse in Montreal to manage, and the couple’s three children were born there. My mother continued to fret for her English homeland all through her young married life. My father was very good to her in that respect, allowing her many trips “home” to England to visit her widower father. After his death during World War I, she continued to visit her sister in the west of England at Taunton in Somerset and to travel in Europe as well. I had been born a “blue baby” and proclaimed “delicate,” and on this pretext, was taken on more of these travels than my older bother and sister, who attended boarding schools in Canada. Travelling was considered a fabulous luxury in pre-airplane days, but actually we lived on a shoestring. I attended local schools in France, Italy, and Switzerland, picking up a smattering of French and Italian, but missing much of my schooling in a Montreal girl’s academy called “The Study.” My brother and sister grew up more compatible with the Canadian life and viewpoints than I, with my heady experiences of continental travel and schools.

On my way to school on the Riviera, I was stimulated by the sight of barques, feluccas, and what I imagined were piratical craft moored to the old mole in the harbour. I sailed in cobbles on the Yorkshire coast and with fishermen in the tides of Bristol Channel, becoming more than ever embroiled in fantasies of life at sea. When sailing aboard liners, mostly the small “A” class vessels of the Cunard Line in and out of the St. Lawrence, we would be aboard for ten days or even two weeks in the event of thick fog. These trips were filled with so much nautical interest that my affinity for eighteenth-century pirates began to mature into investigation of modern sea-going life. By age 14 I was well into Reed’s Seamanship, and by 15 had begun building accurately detailed scale models, not miniatures, of square riggers such as Sovereign of the Seas and Sea Witch, in order to learn about rigging. I sold some of the models in the Canadian Handicrafts Store, and put the money aside for the day when I might find an opportunity to get to sea. At 19, my schooling was over, and I was supposed to become a debutante, but my real life was in reading and learning ship lore. If only Frankie’s Trade, as described by Kipling, had been open to me!

I did not

Old Horn to all Atlantic said

(A-Hay O! To me O Now where did Frankie learn his trade?)

For he ran me down with a three-reef mas’le

(All round the Horn!)

I did not favour him at all.

I made him pull and I made him haul...

And stand his trick with the common sailor

(All round the sands)

I saved enough pocket money to take an international correspondence school course in navigation, which went up to the standard of Master Mariner. Because I was a woman, the committee of the school had to have a meeting to see if they could allow me to take the course. Even in those days that seemed ridiculous and I wished more than ever that I was a boy with a boy’s fuller life. I was so discontented with the narrow lives of girls in those days. Once, when staying with my mother’s sister, Aunt Frances, in her large and historic house near Taunton in England, I overheard the women discussing their friends: “And who did she marry?” was a favourite question among the ladies, disregarding any other qualities the subject of their conversation might possess, such as whether she had qualified as an airwoman, or doctor, or a ballet dancer, not to mention a master mariner ...

One autumn when I was 19, we were returning to Canada aboard the Cunarder Alaunia, where we were much at home. A young bridge boy had gone into Alaunia’s fo’castle, where “Bolshevik Bill,” a lookout man, was holding forth.

“Old Brockie’s aboard.”

“Who’s Old Brockie?” the bridge boy, Ben Davis, wanted to know.

“Why, she’s an odd girl, a nautical passenger. She even climbed up inside the foremast, right up to where I was on lookout in that damned old nest.”

Ben Davis was something of a maverick among the crew because he had done a lot of reading on his own, and learned to speak French. Mainly though, it was his habit of leaving his shipmates while ashore and going to museums, concerts or sightseeing which earned him the title of “La de da Cockney” among the crew. He decided to be bold enough to meet me, but didn’t summon enough courage until Alaunia was so far up the St. Lawrence th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Getting Under Way
• Chapter 2: L’Avenir and I Meet
• Chapter 3: We Sail
• Chapter 4: Shipmates
• Chapter 5: Changing Sails
• Chapter 6: Work and Music Aboard
• Chapter 7: Crossing the Line
• Chapter 8: Jumbo Proposes
• Chapter 9: The Westerlies
• Chapter 10: Port Germein
• Chapter 11: L’Avenir Departs
• Chapter 12: Stowaway
• Chapter 13: Heavy Weather
• Chapter 14: Airman Has Something to
• Chapter 15: Otto
• Chapter 16: I Turn the Ship Around
• Chapter 17: Murder and Rape?
• Chapter 18: Doldrums
• Chapter 19: Spellbinding Trade Winds
• Chapter 20: Anchored for Good
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• About the Author