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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781909911598 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fernhurst Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Bookwire |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 258 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
“I… took a deep breath and signed the contract. This was among the few wise things I have done in my life, for, more than anything else, this boat helped me to get back to my proper trade of writing.”
Arthur Ransome (1884 – 1967), famous in later life as a children’s author, wrote those words in 1922, having just committed himself to the building of his boat Racundra. The maiden voyage took place from 20th August 1922 until 26th September from Riga, in Latvia, to Helsingfors (Helsinki), in Finland, via the Moon Sound and Reval (Tallinn) in Estonia and back. On completion of the trip he wrote and published his first really successful book, Racundra’s First Cruise.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to introduce a completely new edition of Ransome’s first book on sailing. The original text of the first edition, of which only 1500 copies were printed, has been used in its entirety with the original layout. The original 30 photographs, and four sketch charts, are included together with more unpublished Ransome pictures and recent photographs of many of the places visited during the cruise.
The book has been out of print for many years; the last edition was a paperback published in 1984 by Century Publishers, London, and Hippocrene Books, New York, containing charts but no photographs. The story of how he came to write the book and his sailing activities in the Baltic in the early 1920s makes fascinating reading and tells us a great deal about the man and his approach to sailing and writing.
Ransome went to Russia in 1913 following an unsuccessful first marriage and having successfully defended a court case for libel, by Lord Alfred Douglas, over his book Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study, published in 1912. He had a desire to learn Russian and research and translate Russian fairy tales. His book Old Peter’s Russian Tales was published in 1916. He was offered a job as a foreign correspondent and journalist by the Daily News and later the Manchester Guardian. He reported extensively on Russian matters, the First World War, and the aftermath of the October Revolution. Whilst in Russia he met and fell in love with Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s secretary. They lived together as lovers up until the time that Ivy, his first wife, agreed to a divorce. They married at the British consulate in Reval (Tallinn) on the 24th May 1924.
Ransome was a prolific writer and had already published 23 books by 1920. The most successful of his books were Bohemia in London, 1907, A History of Story Telling, 1909, and Old Peter’s Russian Tales, 1916. He had also written two literary critical studies: one on Edgar Alan Poe, 1910, and another on Oscar Wilde, 1912. His life has been extremely well documented in his autobiography, his biography (by Hugh Brogan), and in other books by Christina Hardyment, Roger Wardale, Jeremy Swift and Peter Hunt. A literary society, the Arthur Ransome Society, TARS, is very active and his most famous boat Nancy Blackett (alias Goblin) is run by a charitable trust.
Having had a lifetime interest in Ransome’s work, and having sailed in the Baltic in the year 2000 (where I used Racundra’s First Cruise as a pilot book on several occasions), I was interested in discovering more about Ransome’s Baltic sailing and to find out why and how he came to write Racundra’s First Cruise. I was amazed by the accuracy of his description of Racundra’s sailing area. The instructions for navigating the coasts of Latvia and Estonia, and in particular the Moon Sound, were as useful and accurate today as they were in the 1920s. The details of port and harbour entry and refuge anchorages also hold good today. Indeed, at one stage in our trip we “happened upon” Baltic Port (now called Paldiski North) whilst running for shelter from a southwesterly gale. We immediately recognised the description of the harbour. Once we had moored up the harbourmaster made us most welcome, told us that we could shelter for as long as we liked, at no charge, and even sent someone to sweep the quay where we had moored. This mirrored the treatment Ransome had experienced 78 years earlier. The harbourmaster and his colleague, the director of Paldiski Port, were very interested in the chapter Old Baltic Port and New in Racundra’s First Cruise and, in exchange for a copy, gave us a pamphlet in Russian showing the original plans that Peter the Great had for the area. Ransome mentions on several occasions the uncompleted causeway and the old fort, both of which still exist today.
Ransome’s background as an author and a journalist meant that, by nature, he was a compulsive writer. He kept diaries, logbooks, typed and handwritten notes and full details of his interests and activities. Most of this information still survives, mainly in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.
Ransome’s time in the Baltic up to 1920 had been fully occupied on journalistic activities and political writings of one sort or another although he was fiercely apolitical. In 1920 he and Evgenia had decided to live in Reval (Tallinn), Estonia, where he spent less time reporting and more time writing in-depth articles for the Manchester Guardian. This change of direction in his work activity meant that he was able to enjoy a little more free time to pursue his favourite pastime, fishing. Ransome had sailed a little on Coniston Water, in the Lake District, with his friend Robin Collingwood, son of W.G. Collingwood (the Lakeland poet and writer, a father figure to Ransome after the death of his own father when Arthur was only 13). This introduction to sailing appears to have whetted his appetite for the sport, although in 1920 he considered himself very much a novice. However, he was to learn his skills very quickly.
To set the background for Racundra and Racundra’s First Cruise it is important that we look briefly at his previous boats: Slug in 1920 and Kittiwake in 1921. This period of Ransome’s life has been covered in his autobiography, published in 1976, and in his biography by Hugh Brogan, published in 1984. His early sailing is portrayed somewhat differently in his unpublished notes and writings. In looking at Ransome’s work, shown in American Typewriter font, I have reproduced it exactly as originally written. In the 1920s many of the locations mentioned had different names and I have shown the current names in brackets.
In Peter Hunt’s book Approaching Arthur Ransome, he criticises Racundra’s First Cruise as “a curious volume: it is a specialist work, full of small details of what was a relatively uneventful cruise and many pages of minutiae of sailing and rigging and navigation, which are largely incomprehensible to the layperson. … Ransome leavened the account of sailing in Racundra with encounters ashore, and possibly because they are padding and not focused on his dominant interest at the time, some are in the worst possible manner – pseudo-symbolic, inconsequential, and rather pretentious. (An example … The Ship and the Man, first published in the Manchester Guardian in 1922). … One of the features of Racundra’s First Cruise is that it seems almost a sequel, or a book written for people intimately acquainted not just with sailing, but with Ransome’s life. Old friends, in the form of boats as well as people, continually crop up, scarcely introduced. Kittiwake and Slug are referred to as though we knew them well.”
This was possibly a justified criticism. However, by looking at Ransome’s original material from 1920 and 1921 we can see how he came to include some of his previous experiences in Racundra’s First Cruise.