The jason voyage, p.4
The Jason Voyage, page 4
As I descended the mountain from the village, I left the main road to walk through the straggling forest where Vardikos cut his wood. I could see what he meant by the scarcity of good timber. Most of the pine trees were pitiful specimens, stunted and twisted. Some of the bent trees might suit the curves for the ribs of the boat, but there was scarcely a tree trunk straight enough to provide a decent length of plank. I wondered just how Vasilis could manage with such poor stuff. He was going to have a very difficult task indeed, but there was no choice. I had already seen the bald slopes of Mount Pelion near Volos where Jason's shipwright, Argus, had cut his timber. Now there was not a full-size tree left. The Greek historian Thucydides had complained as early as the fifth century BC that the forests of Greece had been so stripped to build battle fleets that the shipwrights were obliged to travel to Italy and Asia Minor for their timber. A few last stands of Aleppo pine still grew on Samos and the neighbouring island of Mytilene for traditional Greek boatbuilding. But I was not at all confident that Vardikos would be able to supply Vasilis with what he wanted.
Two months later, Uncle John telephoned me from Athens with shocking news. Even he sounded distressed. 'Tim, I'm afraid we have some trouble. I've just been watching the evening news programme on television, and they report a huge forest fire on Samos. There are pictures of the forest in flames. Fire fighters are being sent there from all over Greece, even special planes are fighting the fire by dropping water and chemicals. It looks very bad. They say that most of the pine forest has been destroyed and I'm afraid that includes the timber for your boat.' Sick at heart, I hung up. There was nowhere else I could obtain the right sort of timber in the time available. It seemed inevitable that the building of the galley would be delayed by at least a year.
A week afterwards Uncle John rang again. He had been trying repeatedly to speak to Vardikos, but without success. The telephone lines on Samos had either been commandeered by the emergency services or had melted. But with characteristic persistence, John had finally managed to get through. 'Tim,' he told me, 'It's almost incredible. Vardikos was not supposed to send your timber to Vasilis until next month. But for some reason he decided to send it early. The wood for Vasilis left Samos by ferry on the day before the fire started. It was the last shipment of timber to get off the island. Everything else, including the cut timber waiting at the roadsides to be picked up and most of the standing trees, is in ashes. But Vasilis will be able to get started on time.'
Samos was not alone in presenting planning worries. I had written a letter to the President of the Turkish Yachting Federation. Could he, I asked, possibly advise me on the correct way to apply for permission to conduct a seaborne expedition around the coast of his country, often coming ashore at night on remote beaches? Would the authorities have any objection? I explained that I was hoping to take a small boat all the distance from the Aegean, through the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus, and then into the Black Sea as far as the Turkish-Soviet border. Could the Yachting Federation tell me anything about the conditions we could encounter?
Alpay Cin, the Federation President, was courtesy itself. When I arrived in Istanbul to reconnoitre part of the expedition route, he had already been in touch with the Turkish Navy. The commanding officer of the Naval Academy had lent a motor yacht so that I could see for myself the difficulties of rowing up the Bosphorus.
It was a sobering experience. The admiral's motor yacht needed full power to chug up against the swirling water of the Bosphorus, and a pilot of the Bosphorus pilotage service assured me that cargo ships were often the playthings of the currents. Every year at least one luckless vessel was flung ashore, sometimes with its bows crashing through the first-floor windows of houses built on the bank. The broken-backed hulk of a very large tanker lay stranded at the south entrance to the straits; she had come to grief in the currents. Losing control to the eddies, she had collided with another vessel, caught fire, and then blown up in a huge fireball that people living nearby had mistaken for a nuclear explosion.
On the Black Sea coast of Turkey, Al pay's friends in the Yachting Federation had arranged for me to meet the admiral in command of Turkey's Black Sea ships. I was ushered past crisp sentries in white uniforms, white gloves and red-banded helmets to the admiral's office, which was furnished with over-stuffed chairs in almost Ottoman style. He himself was a genial and splendid figure, the very image of the Grand Turk, his ample chest embellished with rows of decorations and ribbons. He offered me tea in fine porcelain cups, and when I explained my schedule for the expedition he gave a throaty chuckle.
'Well, if you manage to get here next summer, at least you'll be visiting us at the right season,' he said. 'The Black Sea has a bad reputation. The locals say that it has only four safe harbours - Samsun, Trebizond, July and August...' And he threw back his head and gave a massive bellowing laugh that made the teacups rattle.
When I got back home, I encountered another of those happy coincidences that seemed to be part of this voyage. I had not intended to start recruiting a crew until the building of the galley was well advanced. But a letter of application from the first, unwitting, crew member was waiting for me. The writer had recently graduated from my old Oxford college, Keble, and was now taking a course in business administration. But he was bored and wanted a change and wondered if, by any chance, I was organizing another expedition. If so, would I consider including him on the team? He apologized that he had virtually no experience of sailing. His main interest was rowing. He had rowed for the Oxford lightweight crew, had been the Captain of Boats at Keble, and was currently coaching the college crew. Then I noticed what he had studied at Oxford: classical languages. My first volunteer was both a classicist and an oarsman. I wondered if Mark Richards, for that was his name, could even guess what he was letting himself in for. He could have had no inkling that I was planning to go in pursuit of Jason and the Argonauts in a twenty-oared galley.
Colin Mudie had by now almost completed his work. Only one element in the galley's design was still undecided – the precise size and shape of the ram. There are no early references to the ram being used as a battle weapon for puncturing the hulls of enemy ships by ramming them at full speed. Colin suspected that it was originally a device to help a galley move better through the water, like the underwater bulge found on the bows of many modern ships. He had arranged for students at the Southampton College of Higher Education to conduct tank tests of a model galley as part of their studies. I was asked to make up a simple tank test model and to provide a selection of three differently shaped noses that could be stuck on the bows and compared during the tests.
One morning I went down to Southampton to see how the students were getting on. I found them hanging upside down from a moving gantry over the testing tank as they took their class notes on the performance of the canary yellow model, which was being towed up and down the tank with much hissing and whirring of the machinery. To my alarm the instructor started up the mechanism that created artificial waves, and on its next run the little boat bounced up and down in demented fashion. Water splashed aboard in such dollops that it was clear that, in real life, it would certainly founder.
'Don't worry,' said the instructor reassuringly. 'The computer that creates the wave mechanism is programmed to make the sort of waves that would be encountered in the North Sea in a gale. I don't suppose your galley will have to face that sort of challenge.'
The tests confirmed what Colin had suspected: the ram made a marked improvement in the galley's behaviour. She slipped through the water more easily, and the ram flattened the bow wave so that the oarsmen would be rowing in smoother water. Obviously the ancient boat builders had a very good grasp of boat design, and Colin decided to increase the final length of the ram by 2 feet. The tank tests also underlined a piece of data I thought best not to reveal prematurely to the oarsmen who would eventually have to row the boat from Greece to the Soviet Union: twenty men of average fitness, rowing away at the sort of pace that they could sustain for several hours at a time, would exert, taken all together, only 2 horsepower. Their combined effort, all the muscle-cracking strain, would produce no more power than the size of the tiny outboard motor that propels the very smallest rubber dinghy. How could my crew be expected to move 8 tons of galley, kit and crew up the Bosphorus against the currents that I had recently witnessed? This was a question I preferred not to contemplate.
True to his promise, Vasilis was ready to start work on the galley in early October. He took me to the small sawmill where Vardikos' logs had been delivered from Samos and were to be cut to approximate size. There, for the first time, I saw Vasilis in action with his fellow craftsmen. When we arrived at the sawmill the place was not ready for us, despite our appointment. There was no one to be seen, and the big handsaw blade was broken. Vasilis stormed into the mill and let fly: the saw blade must be replaced forthwith and his logs cut immediately. The mill workers took the tirade like lambs. Vasilis stood there muttering under his breath and glaring until the big handsaw was whirling round and slicing up the wood. Even then he did not relax. From time to time he scowled at the handsaw operator, picked over the logs, grumbled that Vardikos had not sent precisely what he wanted. But yes, the timber would do. Then the mill owner was bullied into a promise to deliver the cut planks and beams to Spetses in no more than two days' time. Just after dawn on the second day an ancient truck, piled high with our timber, ground its way along the rough track of Spetses Old Harbour. Beside the lorry, bumping along on his scooter and wearing his cone-shaped felt hat, was Vasilis, like a sheepdog snapping at his flock.
Tom and Wendy Vosmer now arrived from Australia; they had agreed to spend the winter on Spetses, helping with the boat. Tom's job was to act as technical adviser, maintaining historical authenticity in the boatbuilding and performing whatever work the fiercely independent Vasilis would let him do. It was a mission which Tom had to handle with the greatest diplomacy. Vasilis, I had been warned time and again, never liked any other shipwright to touch a single splinter of wood on any of the boats he built. He worked alone, or with a single hand-picked assistant whose main job was to fetch and carry, hold the other end of the plank, tidy up the workshop and generally serve in support of the maestro. This assistant, a friendly young man named Minus, skippered a charter yacht in the summer and only helped Vasilis in the quiet winter months. Five months' work at a stretch with Vasilis was enough for Minus. He told us, incidentally, why Vasilis never spoke directly to Dina, a shipwright working on a boat on the roadway just above Vasilis' workshop. Dina was also an excellent craftsman, and he even shared the same handsaw as Vasilis. The two men worked within 10 yards of each other for eight hours a day, six days a week, all the year round. Yet they never spoke. According to Minus, Dina and Vasilis had trained together as apprentices, and when they started work as fully fledged shipwrights it seemed natural that they should form a partnership. But one day, for a reason never explained, there was such a blazing row that one of them finished up in hospital and the other in the police station. From that day they had not spoken a word to one another.
Tom was very understanding. Traditional boatbuilders, he assured me, were notoriously independent. They liked to work on their own and follow their idiosyncrasies. He had no wish to interfere with Vasilis' way of working. That was all very well, I thought, but the entire project depended utterly on one man – Vasilis. If he lost interest, or went off at a tangent, or – heaven forbid – fell sick, there was not the slightest chance that the galley would be built on time. It was an alarming prospect, but if anyone could get on with Vasilis it was Tom. He too was a perfectionist, supremely patient, and now he was conscientiously learning Greek in order to be able to converse with the maestro.
We rented an out-of-season apartment in a house on the hillside overlooking Vasilis' workshop in the Old Harbour. Every morning from the balcony of the apartment we could see the unmistakable figure of Vasilis wheeling down the steep road on the other side of the harbour on his way to the boatyard. Behind his scooter scurried an extremely tatty bundle of grey-brown fur which was his mongrel dog, and which we had nicknamed Rags. The figure would bump along the track around the back of the harbour, disappear from view, and then re-emerge almost underneath our balcony. The putt-putt of the scooter would stop, and Vasilis, followed by Rags, would march down the path to his workshop while from under planks, scraps of cloth, old upturned boats and empty paint tins appeared a band of half-wild cats, all heading for the plastic bag that dangled from Vasilis' fingers. That bag was a tell-tale. Vasilis, the fierce, scowling Tartar, had a soft spot. Every day he brought food to the waifs and strays who clustered round his workplace. Even on Sunday, his rest day, he would come down from his home at the back of the town to feed them.
Vasilis decided to build the galley on a stretch of foreshore just behind his workshed. Mimas was set to cleaning up the site, and blocks of wood were installed on which to elevate the galley's slender keel. Now came the first head-on collision between Vasilis' traditional habits and the requirements of the new boat. I asked Vasilis to build the keel with a slight upward bow in the middle of it. The theory was that, when the galley was afloat, the weight of men and stores loaded in the centre would press down amidships and flatten out the curve so that the keel lay straight in the water.
As I feared, Vasilis was appalled. No one ever put a curve in the middle of a keel of a new ship, he told me. That was the sign of an old, weary, badly built ship that was coming to the end of its days. He was so vehement that he marched me round to the other side of the harbour to show me just such an ageing vessel on the slipway. 'There!' he said, pointing at the offending curve, 'Look! That ship is on its last legs. You can see she has only a few years left. How can you possibly want a new boat to look like that, sagging at the ends? Never in my life have I heard of a ship being built with a curved keel. It's a crazy idea!'
For the fourth or fifth time Tom and I patiently explained the theory behind the bent keel, and fortunately Vasilis was in a sunny mood. After two hours of argument he suddenly threw up his hands. 'All right. I'll do it. But it's your idea. Not mine.' For comic relief, he pantomimed despair. Putting his head in his arms, he pretended to burst into tears.
A couple of weeks later, when the bowed keel of the future galley was in position on its blocks, with its hump glaringly obvious for all to see, two old men were gazing down on the boat from the roadway and remarked on its bizarre, crooked shape. But by now Vasilis had decided to make a virtue out of the unorthodox structure. 'Can't you tell how excellent it is?' he announced to them with a grand sweep of his arm. 'It's just the way it should be.'
Vardikos had failed to find a piece of wood long enough to make the keel in a single piece, so we had to assemble it from several lengths. The massive centre body of the ram was also made up from smaller pieces pegged to a well-curved section of tree root that gave the basic shape. When all was ready, we gathered round to heave the keel and ram beak onto the building blocks. As soon as the long keel was in place, Vasilis scurried up and down each side, hammering in place a phenomenal number of struts and crossbraces, all intended to stop the timber from warping out of true. This precaution was essential, he explained gruffly, because fresh-cut Aleppo pine twists and bends as it seasons. Unless the keel was trussed up immobile, it would lose its shape, and then it would be impossible to build the boat.
Why didn't he use seasoned timber? I asked. Because seasoned timber was not available at short notice, and fresh-cut pine was better for most jobs because it was more supple. There, I realized, was the practical solution to one of the problems that had bothered historians. They had puzzled over how the Greeks in classical times had managed to replace their damaged fleets so quickly after major battle losses. Some authorities supposed that vast stocks of spare timber were kept in the ancient shipyards, ready to build new ships. If so, how had the ancient shipmasters been able to calculate their future needs? The answer to the problem had been provided by our Spetsiot shipwright: the ancient boatbuilders almost certainly did not use seasoned wood. Like Vasilis, they used fresh green timber, cut as needed and preferred because of its suppleness. The shipwright's skill, whether ancient or modern, was in knowing exactly how each piece of wood was likely to behave as it dried out, how much it would shrink and twist and bend; and then to take this into account as he built his vessel.
Our next step departed from the custom of the ancient shipwrights. They built the hulls of their vessels by attaching planks upward from the keel, like an eggshell, and then dropping in the ribs afterwards. Tom, however, now prepared curved pieces of timber to act as guidelines for Vasilis in shaping the hull. Later, when the hull was at a satisfactory stage, some of these moulds would be thrown away, while others would become ribs for the galley. Tom and I had agreed that this method was sensible. Vasilis was having to cope with producing a shape of boat that was entirely new to him. It was too much to expect him also to learn an entirely fresh work sequence, particularly with planks that warped and twisted so erratically. What mattered was to get the finished hull to the shape that Colin had specified.
