Seasick

In the newspaper the other day I read that DFDS is planning to close the ferry line it operates between Gothenburg and Newcastle. Out competed by cheap air tickets and the end of duty-free sales within the EU. I don’t know exactly how I feel about this. In one sense it’s sad news. There’s been a regular ferry link between Gothenburg and England for years. It has been interrupted for longer periods by war and for shorter periods by storm, it’s true, but the connection (to Newcastle, or Hull, or Harwich, or Felixstowe, or London) has carried people and goods across the North Sea in both directions for well over a century. On the other hand, the ferry route hasn’t always been operated by DFDS, and just because this Danish company has decided to drop the route, doesn’t mean some other enterprising company, perhaps Swedish, perhaps Gothenburgian, might not try their luck. (Should that be Gothenburgundian, I wonder?)

It was Svenska Lloyd who brought Kathleen Nott to Gothenburg in the 1960s, on her way to research her hatchet job on modern Sweden: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. I don’t know who brought Sidney Wood Cooper in the 1880s, but from what he writes (Rambles in Sweden, 1884) it seems to have been a packet steamer operated by an English company. Cooper makes it clear that he doesn’t like the English. At that time thousands of Scandinavian emigrants to the New World were travelling annually across the North Sea in the other direction, to Hull for transhipment onward from Liverpool. That irritated Mr Cooper too. He wished they could be transport by American ships directly to New York. He got his wish, at least in part, in 1915 with the inauguration of the Swedish-American Line. Six years later the Americans started closing the doors on unrestricted immigration, and in 1929 the Great Depression ended it altogether. (The Swedish-American Line carried on as a luxury cruise line until 1975.)

You have to reach back to the era of Napoleon and the French Revolution to find a North Sea crossing that was less regular and less reliable, though it was still there. In 1795 Mary Wollstonecraft, her baby daughter and her daughter’s French nurse, had to be put ashore in a rowing boat as the merchantman they were travelling with didn’t have time to stop in Gothenburg. And 150 years before that, Bulstrode Whitelocke’s little fleet made the same crossing.

That was a much more serious affair.

The little fleet of six ships which carried the embassy to Gothenburg met storm and dead calm, contrary winds and enemy action. The fleet consisted of three fighting ships, Whitelocke’s flagship, the Phoenix, and the Elizabeth, (both naval frigates), and a chartered privateer (name unknown). Beside these there were two chartered merchantmen, the Adventure and the Fortune, mostly carrying baggage provisions and horses, and a fast naval ketch that was supposed to be available for carrying urgent messages back to England.

They sailed from London on 6th November, 1653: “The wind being fair and a fresh gale … By the evening they had sailed as far as [wait for it!] the … Thames mouth.” At this speed, you understand a North Sea crossing was a serious undertaking. And in November, too. No joke.

On the night of 8th, “the frigates were fain [forced] to tow the baggage ships, whose slow sailing much hindered the voyage. The wind blew high and the night was very tempestuous … By the breaking in sunder of the great cable by which [the Phoenix] towed the Adventure, so terrible a crack and noise was made that it awakened all that were asleep with affrightment, and endangered the ship. … Most of Whitelocke’s men were very seasick, only himself and three or four more held well; the ketch was lost, or ran home for fear of the weather.” Except where he is reporting speech, Whitelocke refers to himself in the third person throughout his Journal.

“November 10th: The wind continued all night full against Whitelocke’s course … the ships rolling and tossing very much, and were in great danger … Towards break of day the wind slackened; all the ships were near together, but advanced little or nothing in their course … The wind in twelve hours came about in almost all the points of the compass; it continued most of all against them. … Having thus traversed up and down the wide and rough seas, about four o’clock this afternoon the wind came to the south-east and blew a fresh gale fair for their course … and from four in the afternoon till eight at night the wind blew large and fair, and they … began to come somewhat near to the Continent, towards the coast of Denmark.”

“November 12th: Toward noon the wind came about more to the north-west … The wind was so violently high, and those northern seas so exceeding rough and breaking, that much water came into the ships …”

“November 13th: About eight in the morning, by sounding, they found themselves in great danger; Whitelocke’s ship … made foul water by striking as she passed over the Riff, which is a long bank of sand coming from Jutland in Denmark into the main sea. … about this place the last year, a gallant English frigate was cast away, and her men lost. …”

“November 14th: … Elizabeth fell in chase of a Dutch ship which she could not master till she had shot down one of the Hollander’s sails.” The Netherlands and the English were currently at war, and Whitelocke’s fleet had been earlier shadowed by a Dutch man-of-war. “From her skipper they understood that the late great storm drove eighteen of the Dutch men-of-war on shore and split most of them, and that four thousand dead carcasses of their men floated to the Holland shore.”

Four thousand drowned sounds like an exaggeration. Wishful patriotism? To me that seems unlikely from Whitelocke. If eighteen ships were really lost, and all the crew on each were drowned, it would mean a complement of about 220 sailors on each ship. I suppose that’s possible.

“November 15th: … to the Pater Noster rocks, so called for that the dreadfulness of them puts the passengers in mind of saying their prayers; and surely that coast and country …” (He means the coast of Bohuslän, at that time a part of Norway, now Swedish.) “… being full of huge, tall, craggy, numberless company of rocks … and scarce anything else to be seen, yielded a prospect full enough of dread and terror. … The wind being fair and large, Whitelocke hastened by twelve o’clock at noon, blessed be God, in safety to the port of Gothenburg.”

The Pater Noster rocks are still there. There was a report recently in Göteborgs-Posten about the former Pater Noster Lighthouse, which is being renovated and refurbished by a club of enthusiasts. It is due to be reinstalled on the rocks and open for visitors next the summer. The duties the lighthouse used to perform have been superseded by GPS.

I've been trying to remember when I first arrived in Gothenburg myself, but I can't. The earliest arrival I remember was by boat (DFDS) from Harwich in 1985. I was coming to Sweden to work as a study-circle teacher and was on my way to a town on the other side of the country. There were 33 of us that year, recruited, by an organisation called Kursverksamheten, to work in various towns around Sweden. We had gathered for a 10-day induction course in Salisbury and were then bussed cross-country to Harwich.

After living 2 years in Finland, (home of the sauna), and six weeks in England, (sauna-less), I was delighted to see the ship advertising its bastu, which is the Swedish equivalent. As soon the ship had sailed, I collected my sponge bag and my towel and headed on down. The bastu was down in the keel of the ship, below the lowest car deck and deep below the waterline. I sat in the dimly lit steam room with one or two other bastunauts and sweated.

Gradually, it dawned on me that I wasn’t just sweating from the heat. There was something else as well. My stomach didn’t feel quite right. Perhaps I’d eaten something that didn’t agree with me? I wrapped my towel around me and stepped out of the bastu into the ‘relax area’. There was a lavatory – a single cubicle – which was unoccupied. I shut myself inside and sat on the stool. Then I sat on the floor with my chin over the bowl. Then I changed back. Neither position felt quite right. My head was pulsing and my stomach was churning and I was in sweat that was getting colder and more clammy by the minute. What was wrong with me?

After quite a while (during which several people came and tried the door, knocked, hammered, and called out in rising irritation in Finnish or Swedish), I decided that where I really wanted to be was on deck. I opened the door, ignored the baleful, towel-draped queue and reached the changing room where my clothes were hanging. I got dressed as quickly as I could and staggered off through miles of corridors and up a mountain-side of steps until I reached fresh air. Up there, I realised at last what was wrong with me. At that point, I don’t think I’d ever been seasick before in my life.

I hung over the railings snatching lungfuls of damp, salt air, swallowing and trying to fix my eyes on the horizon, but I kept losing it. After a while, I found my way back indoors and to another lavatory where I was royally sick. I hauled myself out again to the air and back again to the toilet several times. In the mirror over the hand basin, my face looked as white as the basin. There was one fixed idea in my head now – I wanted this to stop. I wondered if air-sea rescue was an option, decided it probably wasn’t and dragged myself off to the reception desk where I begged for sympathy and something, anything, that would make me feel better.

The receptionist eyed me up and down and seemed to be judging the likelihood of me throwing up over her counter. I backed off a little, which seemed to be the right thing to do. She rummaged under the desk and handed over a tablet with the air of one who’d seen this – and worse – and wasn’t about to feel very sorry for me. She reminded me that I ought to have taken a travel sickness pill before boarding, and I think I promised faithfully never no more to go up another gangplank without having taken a handful, cross my heart and hope, an it please God, not to feel like this soon and never to feel like this again.

I sat on the companionway steps and hugged the banisters as I waited for the pill to take effect – which it did, after about an hour and a half. Then I went off to bed.

Anyone who criticises modern technology and medical science and has a hankering back to the good old days needs to think about this: Would you be prepared to spend days in a sailing ship, the wind blowing “high and … very tempestuous, … the ships rolling and tossing very much”, sick as a dog, without pills or a flush toilet?

I have my doubts.