Voyage for a lifetime – Bob Howard’s Pamir experience

[NOTE: As writer/photographer team, Babs and I get to meet some fascinating people! We wrote this article for Boating New Zealand magazine (Oct 2018) – Jon Tucker]

Sixteen-year old Bob Howard just happened to be in the right place when his life’s course changed forever. It was 1947, and his chance to complete a mechanic’s apprenticeship had been dashed by the return to the workforce of many ready-qualified war veterans, so he had decided to follow in his brother Wally’s footsteps and run away to sea.

Back in Nelson, before Bob had caught the old Arahura ferry to Wellington via French Pass, his father had grudgingly acknowledged this unexpected bout of sea fever. “Make sure it’s only a coaster though!” he had instructed sternly. “I don’t want you going foreign.”

The Wellington waterfront, when Bob arrived at Aotea Quay, was dominated by the four lofty masts and eighteen yards of the NZ government’s war prize Pamir, which had been seized at her Wellington berth when Finland was invaded by Germany five years earlier. After a lingering look at the magnificent barque, Bob was about to turn his attention to two of the Anchor Company’s nearby nuggety coasters – Totara and Taupata, looking far less significant alongside the nearby docks.

Meanwhile, in the crew-mess aboard Pamir, one of the deckboys had made the inexcusable mistake of pouring lantern oil on the coal stove, with a flare-up that had him packing his bags with a flea in his ear, resulting in a last-minute order for the mate to find an urgent replacement. The mate must have recognised a strength of character in the nearest young greenhorn with his hand up, despite his total inexperience. Bob was given barely two hours to buy himself a ‘schooner rig’ outfit of seaboots and oilskins before reporting aboard. He had hit the jackpot with this trip – Voyage Ten was to be a complete circumnavigation to England and back, rounding the five Great Capes.

“It all happened so fast,” recalls Bob. “No time to send a telegram to Dad to let him know I was off around the world! I was sent aloft to the main royal yard before I barely had time to draw breath, and I was pretty scared hanging under the futtock shrouds, but it was just something I knew I had to do! I guess it was a good way to get to know the ship.”

It literally was a steep learning curve for young Bob Howard and the other eleven inexperienced deck-boys, who had signed articles on a monthly wage of £12 10s and were to become indispensible cogs in the day-to-day running of the ship. Next in the pecking order were the five ‘buckos’ – Ordinary Seamen – who were rewarded for the experience already under their belts with a wage of nearly twice as much as Bob’s. Their mentors were the eight AB’s (Able Bodied Seamen) who were split up across the two four-hour watches, and were waged at a monthly rate of £32 2s 6d. Every crew member was expected to work equally hard, but the value of sheer experience was clearly reflected in the wage rates.

Young Bob had a huge amount of information to learn by heart in a short space of time, much of it being imparted by the qualified seamen in his watch. Each of the 32 sails had its own complex set of running rigging to memorise – halliards, buntlines, clewlines and braces, all with dedicated belaying pins which needed identifying in darkness or gale-lashed conditions. “But you learnt quick,” he comments, with a shrug.

As Pamir’s warps were being cast off to clear Aotea Quay, there was a call from the Mate: “Howard to the wheel.”

“I couldn’t believe that here I was on my first day at sea, steering a square-rigger longer than a rugby field,” recalls Bob with a faraway look in his eyes. “Of course I was sharing the helm with an AB, but I was certainly thrown in the deep end.” Helming Pamir was a potentially brutal job, usually requiring two men and sometimes four, heaving on the tandem ten-spoked wheels. On this first day though, the wind was only a light northerly, and the rest of the crew was aloft setting almost every stitch of canvas as they rounded Somes Island and headed towards the Wellington heads.

In fact it was three days before Bob at last had the chance to send a radio-telegram home, by which time the ship was already past the Chatham Islands, on the great circle route towards Cape Horn:                         “JOINED PAMIR STOP ON WAY TO ENGLAND STOP”

Watch-keeping duties, four hours on, four off, dominated every aspect of young Bob’s life as Pamir plunged through the Roaring Forties. Shipboard dynamics among the crew and officers became quickly established. The first Mate, Andy Keyworth left a lasting impression on Bob and the other deck-boys in his watch for his sarcastic discipline. “We were scrubbing the decks one day when Keyworth told Jimmy Green to go fetch a hammer. As soon as Jimmy returned, Keyworth used it to smash the bristly end off the broom, and handed Jimmy back just the handle – ‘you might find it easier this way Green!’ ” Apparently for the rest of the voyage Jimmy was much more energetic about his maintenance duties.

“Keyworth wasn’t brutal or vindictive, but he certainly got his expectations across,” says Bob wryly. “One day in the South Atlantic after we’d rounded the Horn, I was on the helm and Keyworth asked me if I liked New York. I told him I didn’t know – ‘Never been there sir!’ … ‘Then get back on your course Howard!’ ”

The ships boys were well treated in accordance with the Union Company policies, unlike many such youngsters a few decades earlier. Naturally crossing the line (equator) had the usual high jinks, with some ‘pretty awful’ stuff rubbed onto their hair and faces, but Bob speaks highly of the officers – Captain Collier had his wife aboard for the voyage, and kept a close eye on the running of the ship. One fairly lively day Bob was on the helm when the Captain spotted a loose buntline and came across to relieve him at the wheel so he could belay it.

“I warned him – you’d better watch it Sir – she’s kicking a bit. I looked over my shoulder a moment later and saw him knocked to the deck. When I got back he looked at me a bit ruefully  – ‘Go below lad and get an extra hand on the wheel.’ ”

Bob has plenty of good words for the other senior members of the ship’s complement too. “The bosun, Jack Carey was a good guy and the bosun’s mate too. The cooks did us proud, and George Gunn the sailmaker looked after us pretty well too.” Even Keyworth, despite his cutting temperament, was highly respected for his competency. “He was tough too,” says Bob, relating an incident when the Mate caught a big sea and was washed into the scuppers, badly cutting his eyebrow. “When the Old Man started to stitch him up, Keyworth just pushed him away – ‘I’ll do it myself!’”

The finer details of this epic circumnavigation – largely drawn from the ship’s Log – can be read from Jack Churchouse’s definitive volume The Pamir Under the New Zealand Ensign. But hearing Bob talking of the voyage from first-hand memories brings a fresh dimension to the whole grand story.

Still vivid in his memory is the huge fanfare on their arrival even before being towed up the Thames and discharging the cargo of tallow and wool. “We’d made a smart trip of only eighty days, and we were filmed for all the newsreels. Then we had to set to work getting her spotless before Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh were welcomed aboard.” Bob even got to briefly speak to the future queen, and has some black and white footage to prove it.

Whilst docked in London, much political manoeuvring was under way to determine whether Pamir should be returned to her pre-war Finnish owners. But after nearly four months and several crew changes, Pamir was part-loaded with British white cement, and towed across the English Channel to Antwerp.

“Nobody told us why we weren’t crossing under canvas,” comments Bob. “But we found out afterwards that the channel was still littered with mines, and we were being towed through a swept section.” In Belgium there was also huge media interest during the fortnight that the barque was being loaded with her remaining cargo – basic slag from the steel mills, destined for the fertiliser works.

The return trip, through the notorious mid-Atlantic doldrums and around the Cape of Good Hope, was significantly longer than the outbound one. Sail changes from heavy weather canvas to light, and then back again were a major task, with nearly an acre of canvas capable of being spread under full sail. By now Bob was a thoroughly competent young crew-member, and he has vivid memories of the huge shark that was caught in the doldrums, and the mean sea they encountered crossing the Australian Bight.

After a 109 day trip from Antwerp (logged as 106 from abeam of Dover), Pamir rounded Auckland’s North Head under full sail (the first full-rigged ship to have ever done so according to Captain Collier), providing a spectacle watched by thousands of Aucklanders from every vantage point.

Bob’s eyes shine with pride as he finishes talking and we pause to admire several framed paintings and photographs of Pamir that adorn his living-room walls, before he leads us to a spare room filled with the dozens of ship models that he has spent much of his spare time creating during the seventy years since that significant moment in history. Among them are four of Pamir, ranging in size from bottles to metre-long masterpieces. He relates how he spent the subsequent five years aboard various coasters – Titoki, Arahura, Kaitoa, Mamaku and even the old Hokianga (which later gained fame as Radio Hauraki’s first pirate radio-ship Tiri). We linger to admire an enormous radio-controlled model of Huia, and to photograph various mementos of his time aboard Pamir – ships’ articles, discharge papers and various photographs of a strikingly fit young man aboard a huge sailing ship.

Bob Howard is one of the very last Cape Horners in the world – men who have rounded the notorious cape under square rig carrying a full cargo. The international Cape Horner’s Association has effectively ceased to exist, and New Zealand’s Pamir Association was disbanded when its membership had dwindled to barely a soul. We are very conscious as we drive away that we have been privileged to hear his first-hand description of the type of experience that we have previously only savoured from the written accounts of men such as Alan Villiers and Joseph Conrad.

He has lived a voyage that we mortals can now only dream about.

FOOTNOTE 1:

The Pamir story had an abrupt tragic ending nearly a decade later. A year after Bob Howard’s voyage, Pamir was sold to the German government for conversion to a cargo-carrying training vessel capable of carrying 60 youngsters. In 1957 her cargo of grain shifted during an Atlantic gale, and she foundered with the loss of 80 lives. Regulations were subsequently put in place to ban all sail training vessels from commercial use.

FOOTNOTE 2:

When the Union Steamship Company took over the running of Pamir, it had no sail-making facility, only a loft in Evans bay which made canvas hatch-covers. A number of new sails were machine-stitched in this loft, but when these began to fall apart as the chain-stitching unravelled, it became an ongoing chore for crew-members to hand-stitch every seam as a precaution.