I am a great appreciator of Frank Worsley. If you shook me awake in the middle of the night and demanded to know who my favourite explorer of the Heroic Age is, I would gurgle out “Wuzzles” before starting to snore again. I simply think his life is of grand historic importance and should be examined through all manner of theoretical lenses and subjected to deep literary, historical, sociological, psychological, historiographical, physiological, archaeological, anthropological, meteorological, and epistemological analysis. I brook no argument.
If you’ve taken a tumble down the slippery slope into polar madness then you’ll be all too familiar with the feeling that you really know the people who populate the pages of the history books. With the plethora of diary accounts, it’s hard not to start getting personally attached and wondering, what does drive a person to the life of an explorer? Adventure, curiosity, something else? Why on earth are these people the way they are? And nothing gets the heart racing like encountering something that offers answers, or at least the opportunity to start spiralling wildly off into conspiracy pinboards and bombarding all your friends with theories, armchair psychiatrising your favourite men who are dead.
In this case, the something is the book First Voyage in a Square Rigged Ship, one of Frank Worsley’s lesser known literary efforts. This book has nothing to do with polar exploration, but is instead precisely what it says on the tin: an account of Worsley’s first experiences at sea as a young apprentice in the service of the New Zealand Shipping Company. It’s a delightful read detailing arduous days of work matched with sleepless nights, being affectionately bullied by older crewmates, and getting into trouble for death-defying acts up in the rigging, all with a deep abiding love of life at sea that glows off of every page.
There are also a few passages that made me nearly fling the book. (Though I would sooner fling myself as I am both younger and springier than the lovely first edition I was gifted for Christmas. Thank you, Caitlin, for facilitating my illness.) So that’s why you are the way you are, I growled, pressing my nose up to the pages like a child against the window of a toy shop. Frank Arthur Worsley, I’m coming for you. You little weirdo.
I: THE WORSLEY THRILLS
It’s safe to say that Worsley was a colourful character. Brilliant navigator and perennial wanderer moving from job to job, adventure to adventure; terrible with finances to the point that he and his wife Jean never quite had a permanent residence, instead staying instead with a rotating set of accommodating friends; dedicated to the sailing ships that he loved so much to the exclusion of more stable career choices; and apparently perfectly happy with his lot in life until the end.
Worsley was a sailor to his bones. More than once he was in command of a vessel on which the auxiliary engine broke down, forcing him to rely on sail power alone. Although forcing isn’t quite the right word, as it was a misfortune that he seems to have relished. The Island, the ship of the 1925 British Arctic Expedition of which Worsley was co-leader, was described by the man himself as having been “profaned” by a semi-diesel engine, and when early on in the voyage the propeller blades were snapped off by ice, Worsley’s official account of the expedition is nothing short of gleeful. A decade later a similar misfortune occurred while Worsley was captaining the Veracity enroute to the Cocos Islands as part of a treasure hunting scheme, to be greeted with similar elation. Disdainful references to steam power abound in Worsley’s writing: he simply didn’t consider it proper seamanship.
Worsley’s other characteristic at the helm was his near-foolhardy determination to carry on through just about anything the ocean could throw at him. He had a marked predilection for skirting up to the edge of danger and disliking a retreat, one of the more dramatic examples of this being a voyage in late 1920, when he and Joseph Stenhouse took their ship the Annie from Leith to Reykjavik, encountering horrendous weather all the while. Worsley insisted on muscling through the storm rather than heaving to and waiting it out, getting by his own count only 14 hours sleep across the entire week in his attempt to make the passage in as little time as possible. But he seemed to relish the challenge, writing that throughout the ordeal he and Stenhouse had "enjoyed ourselves royally as Kings of the Sea and Salt of the Ocean!"
He gained rather a reputation for it. On the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition there were multiple instances during both the boat journey to Elephant Island and then later in the James Caird to South Georgia in which Worsley urged Shackleton to sail on through darkness or inclement weather, and some years later while sailing master of the Quest during Shackleton’s final expedition south in 1921, Worsley wrote to Jean that the Boss had ordered him to wait out a storm with the warning, “None of your games, Wuzzles – heave her to.”
Heaving to, for those less familiar with the nitty gritty of sailing, is essentially a way of putting a little parking brake on a sailing vessel. This can be used to come to a stop while in water too deep for anchoring and is a common tactic for weathering out a storm. When hove to, the sails are set so that some attempt to drive the ship in one direction while others try to push it the opposite way. As a result you remain more or less in one spot with only a gentle drift. Heaving to provides stability for carrying out repairs or allowing a tired crew to get some rest, so all in all it’s a sensible thing to do.
So why on earth was heaving to something that Worsley seemed to go out of his way to avoid doing? Why did he always attempt to sprint everywhere he went, at the expense of his own health and comfort?
It’s not exactly a mystery, you say to me witheringly, Wuzzles was a mad lad. We all know that. Yes, alright, you have a point there. But hush. I’m trying to analyse. Certainly Worsley was a bit of a risk-taker by nature, exemplified in his own words by his “love of hazard”. He was well-known on the Endurance for taking full advantage of her ice-breaking capabilities, what ship's doctor Alexander Macklin wryly terms the “Worsley thrills” in his own diary. And he was clearly having a whale of a time beating up through a hurricane in a tiny schooner some years later.
So simply being a daring sort certainly had quite a lot to do with it. But I’d like to reach into my bag, rummage about, and emerge triumphantly clutching that oldest of chestnuts: nature and nurture. That’s right. It’s time to take a trip into the past. Or, you know, further into the past. I know we’re already in the past. But before the Heroic Age – you know what, I don’t have to explain myself, let’s just go to 1887.
II: THE BOOK REPORT
It was in this year (or most likely so, I am begging the man to include dates in his writing) that a fifteen year old Frank Worsley joined the crew of the New Zealand Shipping Company vessel the Wairoa and set sail from Lyttelton to London. The course took the ship around Cape Horn and up across the Atlantic, a journey detailed delightfully in First Voyage in a Square-Rigged Ship. You may be getting a growing suspicion that I’m a biased reviewer but it really is an excellent book, imminently readable and brimming over with love for the sea and all its aspects. Worsley’s writing leaps off the page: he’s prone to romantic descriptions of ships and of sunlight on the water, and to delving deeply into the nostalgia of his New Zealand childhood. He’s an enthusiastic writer in every sense. One adjective will never suffice when there are two which work just as well. No detail given is brushed over. Anything that Worsley thinks worth mentioning receives its full due. Reading it took me far longer than expected, not because it was in any way a slog but because I had to stop every other page to fire off the latest bonkers report from The Adventures of Young Wuzzles to all my friends and shout excitedly at them about it.
One thing that becomes clear throughout the story is that this titular first voyage is intensely formative for Worsley. The circumstances are a perfect storm for making a big honking impression on a young boy: he's fifteen years old and leaving New Zealand for the first time, he's constantly sleep-deprived and undernourished, he's already a rather cheeky, precocious sort – and he's absolutely having the time of his life. From the way Worsley writes about the ship and his friends on the crew, you can see him falling in love with the life even as he bemoans the lack of sleep and food.
There’s also a rather revealing incident on the way around Cape Horn. Almost immediately after setting sail from New Zealand, the Wairoa runs into some fierce weather during which Tiny Worsley is seasick for days and there are some descriptions of the heavy seas in the higher latitudes to make your heart beat faster. As you are white-knuckling your way through the pages it might cross your mind that Captain Bungard, master of the vessel, is playing things a bit riskily. Rounding the Horn, a classic tricky bit of work, in a gale with valuable cargo. Shouldn’t the captain take it easy, heave to or at least shorten sail to wait out the weather?
But of course he doesn’t stop. Because the Wairoa is a wool clipper. And that’s precisely what caught my attention when thinking about the various influences at play upon Our Boy. Naturally Worsley grew into his own as a sailor with an appreciation for pushing through and running as quickly as possible, because he spent those influential years of his young life learning his trade on clipper ships, and clipper ships are like fancy, over-powered sports cars: they look out of place and embarrassing when you see them stuck in traffic. Why did you spend all that money just to sit there?
Have yourself a gander at the way Worsley describes the way the Wairoa beats on through the gale:
On storms the good ship all night through the darkness, hard driven by the seamanlike pride of her anxious but conscientious captain. How easy for him to give the order "Heave-to"; then after three or four hours' hard work by all hands he could turn in for a night's sleep - having lost his owners a day and perhaps missed the wool-sales for his cargo. "No," says the master mariner. "So have the men of my cloth built up the trade of England and the pride of her seaman, and so shall I uphold them."
It’s hard to argue with that. Twin prides at play, professional and national, on a ship whose raison d’être – whose entire reputation – is built on being fast as hell.
III: GOTTA GO FAST
But what exactly is a clipper ship? Why are they special? Why are they sexy? What’s the point?
The term isn’t used to describe a type of ship so much as a purpose. As the name might suggest, a clipper is built for speed above all things, and so usually features a slim hull and a stupendous expanse of canvas. The glory days of the clipper are generally accepted to have lasted from 1843 to 1869, but they remained important in trade and passenger routes until the 1880s, and stuck around for some time beyond that, albeit in a swiftly shrinking role.
The calling of the clipper was to be the first in port out of all the other ships carrying the same goods. Notable commodities connected with the demand for swift sailing were grain, wool, and, of course, tea, the latter two which are intrinsically tied to a ship with which you’re likely passing familiar: the Cutty Sark, one of the last tea clippers built in the 1860s and now a great day out in Greenwich.
For tea merchants back in England, it was profitable to get the first batch of tea arriving from China and so having the fastest ships offered a tremendous commercial advantage. This is economics 101, she says, in the confident tones of someone who definitely doesn’t remember much from economics 101. Get there first, get the best price. Sure. Sounds about right. So some traders started offering bonuses to tea clipper crews if they were the first in port, incentivising speed and paving the way for the tea races of the mid-19th century. The so-called “Great Tea Race” of 1866 was the last of these competitions to have an actual monetary incentive, but the prestige of being the first clipper home was by that point well-established and continued to hold weight.
The New Zealand Shipping Company to which the Wairoa belonged would have had this same interest in their ships being the first to drop their mooring lines. Even without the concrete incentive of a premium on top of wages, having a reputation as a swift ship with an efficient crew could net a captain better cargo and better prices. Prestige did pay. When Worsley speaks admiringly of his captain’s refusal to do anything less than absolutely fly around the Horn despite the raging gale, it’s a direct consequence of this. His very first introduction to the career he would follow for the rest of his life was steeped in the culture of the clipper. Although sails were beginning to be pushed out by the rising competition presented by steamships, this culture was not to be so easily dislodged and Worsley, interestingly enough for a character who otherwise loved risk and adventure, was rather a traditionalist when it came to ships, eschewing advances for the familiar technology of sail power with which he had cut his teeth on the high seas. That first impression so lovingly recorded in the pages of First Voyage made its mark on a young boy and Worsley as a child was still very much surrounded by the dominance of sail and clipper ships in particular, despite it getting rather late in the day for it.
IV: IT’S 1869 AND SAILS ARE NEVER GONNA DIE
The Suez Canal was completed at the end of 1869 and very quickly several things became apparent. First of all, the canal could not be navigated by cargo clippers. Steamships, however, had no such issue. This led directly into a second realisation, which was clipper ships swiftly finding themselves becoming moribund.
But clippers were only one piece of the tapestry. The precise end date of the Age of Sail is placed roughly in the middling nineteenth century and it was certainly not as sudden as flicking a switch. If you are a human, or if you have any friends who are humans, you might have noticed that they are, on the whole, creatures of habit. This of course varies from human to human, but in general, and particularly when you get a big crowd of them together, they tend to dislike change. So it was with sails. 1872, the year of Worsley’s birth, saw a famous tea race between Cutty Sark and Thermopylae. The New Zealand Shipping Company was founded the year after in 1873 with a fleet initially composed entirely of sailing ships. This doesn’t even touch upon the cultural resilience of sailing as it pertained to the identity of the British Empire as a military power. Take a look at the British battleships of the First World War and you will see that, beyond all reason, many are equipped with masts and yardarms for square-rigged sails. In the empire that ruled the waves, the identity of a sailor as someone who could actually sail stuck around for a time even after steam took final, undeniable precedence over canvas.
And Worsley was very much a colonial child of the empire. The apprenticeship onboard the Wairoa was necessary to earn what he calls the "proud square-rigged ticket", important credentials required by the British Board of Trade. In order to receive the square-rigged ticket, the ships served upon had to be ocean-going, square-rigged ships. "Coasting ships would not do, deep-sea fore-and-afters would not do, and as for steamers – pooh!" says Worsley, and goes on to claim that these requirements were still in effect at the time he was writing, in the late 1930s.
So there remained very much a prestige to a square-rigged ship, and not only in Worsley’s mind. Even after the heyday of tea clippers had come and gone, trade on sailing vessels continued, as did the associated pride of making all possible time. Grain races on sailing vessels lasted until the mid-twentieth century, by which time it was entirely a matter of flash and public perception with no actual economic incentive. By the by, East Coasters yearning after the Cutty Sark can scratch at least part of that itch by visiting one of the ships involved in the grain races, the barque Moshulu, which is now a floating restaurant in Philadelphia. I once had a rather good brunch there and enjoyed poking about, admiring the photographs they have on display showing the ship in her prime under sail. (Caitlin was actually there as well! Caitlin! Remember when I drank too many poinsettia cocktails on the Moshulu!)
V: THE WUZZ THAT WAS
Take an impressionable teenager, put him on a clipper ship, and submerge him in a culture where skilful seamanship and professional pride abound, no matter that the era of sails is drawing to a close. We’ve already mentioned that he’s naturally a bit of a scamp, right? Puzzling these pieces together, small wonder that Worsley wound up the kind of sailor who would gleefully race his way through a gale rather than wait it out.
By the 1920s, the steamer had most certainly arrived but Worsley continued taking jobs on sailing vessels running cargo, delivering yachts, hunting for treasure; the vast majority of his work on the water was done under sail. It was his element, what he valued. In his book Endurance, Worsley writes rapturously about encountering the France, one of the last great sailing ships of the age, while headed south on the Quest with Shackleton, even persuading the Boss to let him alter course slightly in order to get a closer look. “Anything to do with the old sailing ships had for me an irresistible attraction,” he says, a sentiment which shines through in all his writing. He certainly had the temperament for spending his life on the ocean: love of the natural world, eagerness for a challenge, and, it has to be said, a bit of enjoyment for suffering. Anyone who has ever done a bit of the proverbial messing about in boats knows that even the smallest dinghy comes with its own array of aggravations and upsets, delays and disasters. If a smiling sailor ever approaches you with a friendly offer of a pleasant hour out on the water, clear your schedule for the entire day.
First Voyage in a Square Rigged Ship offers a fascinating little insight into a man whom I find to be one of the most interesting figures of the Heroic Age. Worsley was a contradictory fellow, at once a blindingly competent sailor and a curiously lax captain, at least as far as discipline went. He was a speed demon who turned up his nose at steam engines, an irreverent teller of tall tales, and the only man on Earth who seems to have actually enjoyed himself during World War One. Taking a peek at such a formative event early in his life is both enjoyable and intriguing, and I can’t recommend the book highly enough for anyone with an interest in either Worsley himself or sea stories in general. Even the despairing descriptions of the poor food and the back-breaking work seem strangely tantalising at the end of his pen, and I dare you to give this a read and come away without even the slightest yearning to be a sprightly young kid stepping into a life at sea, learning to look down your button nose at steamships and cling to the wheel in a gale, determined to prove yourself to someone – fellow crewmates, an employer on the other end of the voyage, or perhaps simply the ocean itself.
Books That Have Informed This Thing You Just Read.
I almost cracked open the Chicago Manual of Style for a proper bibliography but thought it might imply a more rigorous level of research than I’m willing to take ownership of, so. Here you go.
Clark, Arthur H. The Clipper Ship Era.
Haddelsey, Stephen. Ice Captain.
Lansing, Alfred. Endurance.
Thomson, John. Shackleton's Captain.
Worsley, Frank Arthur. Endurance.
Worsley, Frank Arthur. First Voyage in a Square Rigged Ship.
Worsley, Frank Arthur. Under Sail in the Frozen North.
If you’re interested in learning more about tea clippers, I can also point you to several articles in the Upton Tea Quarterly series, “Reversals of Fortune in the Tea Industry”. My family used to physically receive this tea-centric newsletter and I was intrigued by these as a teen. It was actually my mother who reminded me of it when I was home for Christmas, spending much of my time sprawled on the couch muttering things like “no way” and “he’s so real for this” while engrossed in First Voyage. I forced her to listen to my Clipper Ships Made Him Crazy theory and she said well why don’t you revisit ol’ Upton Tea, thereby bringing me full circle in this enjoyable thing I’ve been calling my life.
It feels ages late now, but I absolutely adored this! A really fun & lovely read <3