E. F. Knight (1852–1925)

Knight writes an engaging travelogue of his cruise from England to an island named Trinidad in 1889 in search of buried treasure. He starts the narrative in the Fall of 1888, leaves Southampton in late August 1889 and manages to return in February 1890 (whether successful or not, I won't disclose).

He includes all the important details for such a trip as this and one gets the impression that following his steps of preparation, his packing lists and his timeline, a successful voyage could be made today.

As a sailor, I particularly appreciate Knight's ability to depict the sea, the islands, his moorings and the various difficulties encountered and how their little yacht was handled through them.

While in the middle of this book, I was astounded by the similarities to [book: Peter Duck] and others from the [author: Ransome] series and will have more to say about that later.

I've rated this book two of five stars mostly because you've got to be a certain type of reader to get through Knight's writings. This is not an armchair expedition but a synopsis of the Alerte's logs and as a consequence, may be a bit dry to some readers.… (plus d'informations)

As Arthur Ransome makes clear in his introduction, this is not a tale of maritime derring-do, it is an account of a brave voyage made by a small craft with a two-man crew. Although there are no thrills and spills, the account is engaging and amusing – closer to the pastoral travelogues of Jerome K. Jerome than to the gripping writing of Ransome himself. This edition meets the exacting standards that the book lover expects from Rupert Hart-Davis; the maps in particular are a welcome asset and make the journey far easier to follow.… (plus d'informations)

E.F. Knight had the usual sort of background for a young man of his time and class - Westminster School, Caius, and Lincoln's Inn - but instead of practicing at the bar he divided his time between adventurous travel, mostly in small boats, and working as a war correspondent for the Times and Morning Post. He was on the spot for just about every important conflict from the Franco-Prussian to the Russo-Japanese war, losing an arm in the second Boer war. Both Erskine Childers and Arthur Ransome acknowledged him as a major influence for their sailing stories.

Small-boat sailing is a collection of good advice obviously based on decades of practical experience. To those who say "you can't learn seamanship from a book", Knight's response is that they may be right, but that the right book can at least save you a lot of time during the learning process. However, it's probably also fair to say that boats and equipment have changed so much in the last century that there's not a huge amount in this book that will be of any practical value to a modern reader, unless they are involved in sailing or restoring historic vessels. For the rest of us, it's mostly interesting as a period piece, and occasionally helpful in giving an explanation for some of the things mentioned in Victorian and Edwardian sailing books that we find puzzling - what's the difference between a sliding gunter and a balance-lug, how to set a topsail on a cutter, what's meant by "scandalising the mainsail", how to arrive at and depart from a mooring under sail, how to measure depths and speeds without electronic instruments, what papers you need when arriving in foreign ports, and so on.

Actually, the chapter on coastal navigation, which is reassuringly coarse and unmathematical, has a lot of sensible advice that would probably still be useful to modern sailors for those days when the electronics go wrong at a bad moment. But I did stop and do a double-take when he airily mentioned 25 degrees as the correction for magnetic variation to apply in British waters. It's more like 1 degree at present, so for yachting purposes you can safely ignore it. A century is a long time!

Of course, there are also a lot of little anecdotes from Knight's colourful career along the way - the (unsuccessful) treasure-hunting expedition off the coast of Brazil that inspired Peter Duck; running the US blockade to land in Cuba by canoe during the Spanish-American war; sailing on the Red Sea and on the Nile in local craft during the Sudan campaign; and so on. Although he has clearly developed a journalist's hard-nosed instinct for self-promotion over the years, you do occasionally get a little hint that Knight may have a sense of the ridiculous tucked away somewhere ("No girl over her doll can contrive to make herself more perfectly happy than is the true yachtsman over his little ship").

However, I did find it interesting - and a little bit disturbing - that he never bothers to find an alternative expression for "singlehanded", a word that appears very frequently in the book. He could easily have said "alone on board" or "without a crew", or something of the sort. For a man who lost his right arm shortly before writing this book, it must have been a very painful word to use. Maybe he is doing it to demonstrate how tough he is?… (plus d'informations)