quigonejinn

I am kind of in terrible, horrible, idolatrous love with my new Livejournal layout. Yes, it is a barely-tweaked version of Long Time Running from

thefulcrum, but OMG, it is the first LJ layout that I have actually bothered to muck with in three years, and I saw it on

la_foule, and it was so beautiful and.

...

From the modestly titled and very, very good The Greatest Sailing Stories Ever Told, a selection from The Incredible Voyage by the always truthful Tristan Jones. It made me want to run away to Madagascar. In addition to, uh.

Australian sailors have a term -- "seeing the country and meeting the people." What it really means is going on a good run ashore, having a few drinks, visiting different bars, and making friends, mostly with all the pretty girls that cross your bows. That is exactly what we did in Majunga; for I had earned enough cash to have some to spare, and a bored sailor is a bad sailor. We ate well, for the restaurants are cheap; we drank perhaps a little too much, for smuggled booze is cheap; and we made a lot of friends, fair and dusky. So many, in fact, that when we came to leave, Christian, the harbormaster, actually accused me of not having learned on damned thing in fifteen years!

From Majunga we cruised slowly what is surely the loveliest cruising ground int eh world (or so I thought until Lake Titicaca). The air is so clear that it seems you can touch the Massif Centrale, a range of mountains two hundred miles away. in the mornings the limpid sky and the sea appear to be joined together, so that it is impossible to see the horizon, and all the time you are floating in the clearest water I have ever seen. The bottom at sixty feet is as plainly visible as the floor under your feet. It was as if the boat was afloat in a crystal bowl. The silence was so delicate, a shimmering, trembling silence, that it seemed that the slightest noise would shatter the world around you into a million pieces.

Barbara would ghost along in the lightest of zephyrs, and we would creep around the deck, whispering so as not to shatter the magic. There were hundreds of islands off this coast, most of them uninhabited, full of birds and luxurious vegetables. Sandy, untrodden beaches, coral reefs aswarm with fish, safe anchorages, and the best sailing imaginable, all under the lee of Madagascar, with the monsoon coming off the land and a dead flat sea.

We were in no hurry, for ahead of us lay the long, stormy passage around South Africa and the cape of Good Hope. It was still only September, the southern spring. It would be best to dally until November before tackling one of the roughest sea passages in the world, the thousand mile run between Durban and Capetown.

I found out a curious thing while we were visiting these islands. It is always my habit when in remote parts to visit the chief elder of any community. At Nosy Vahalia, because I had nothing else suitable, I took the chief one of my old navy shirts -- the old collarless type with a tail fore and aft. The chief, an ancient about ninety years old, was beside himself with delight. These folk are Moslems, and he intended to wear the shirt to the mosque. He first gave me coffee and a cheroot to smoke, then sent for chickens for me to take back. When we awoke on board out at anchor the next day, we found the cockpit full of vegetables, fruit, and fish. We had enough food for three weeks . . .

During this slow passage down the coast of Madagascar we fished a deal and caught many stingrays, the wings of which make delicious eating, something like Dover sole. We also caught dorado, for this is one area where the ocean fish comes in near to shore. The rocky shores were alive with landcrabs, and these, too, made good eating, while on the coral reefs were enough crabs and crayfish to keep us gorged for life. Ashore there were limes, lemons, small oranges, tomatoes, breadfruit, wild pig, and goat. There were few insects, none at all on the islands. Every night we would barbecue on the beach and the glare of the firelight revealed thousands of land-crabs watching our antics with curiosity. But they were harmless, and would scurry away as soon as we moved towards them. They were ugly-looking devils, gray and hairy, and seemed almost obscene to us; then we remembered that we were brown and hairy too, and that crabs probably thought the same about us, except for Alem, who was very black and almost hairless, and terrified of the crabs.

Excuse me. I am now going to run away to the coast of Madagascar. Also, this made me laugh for about half an hour.

During this time the Cape of Good Hope became a very important sailing route, with ships richly laden passing to and from the East and Europe. With the trade, as always int eh days before the steamer, came the pirates, the freebooters, and for well over a century Madagascar was the lair from which they woudl pounce on the East Indaimen on their way to and form the Cape. To this day in the Comores and Madagascar, a steamship, indeed any foreign vessel of any kind, is called a "mannowarri," which comes from the old British term, "Man o'War." A froeign seaman is known as a "goddami," for until the 19th century "goddamn" was a favorite British expletive. On Madagascar "goddammi mannowarri" means a sailor from a foreign ship! This is part of the Swahili language in that area.

CS Forester is at the very end with The Man Who Felt Queer, and ahahah. Oh man. I saw this in the bookstore today and was immediately gripped by a powerful longing for both the book and, in addition, modern day AU fic about HH as a married-into-money guy who is having a wooden ship built for him by you-know-who.