From Under Water

by George Hill, English journalist

(Aboard H.M.S. Rose, May 1996)

Editor's note: George Hill passed away shortly after his trans-atlantic voyage aboard the Rose. He was an excellent companion and is missed very much by those who had the honor of being his shipmates.

Warm in my bunk, while the ship all round me is driving steadily towards Europe, I sometimes stay awake long enough to listen to the sounds below the waterline.

The sound of our advance lulls me - the intermittent swish and thud on the other side of the planking as the bow hoists another wave aside. There are two distinct water sounds down there, easy to tell apart: the other is a more intimate, regular chuckle, inside the hull with me - the noise of our bilge water pouring from side to side as we roll. A teaspoonful can sound like a flood.

Dry noises mingle with the wet ones. A wooden hull in a seaway is never silent. As it flexes under the stresses of wind and sea, it creaks and crackles. In gentle weather, the sound is like the creaking of an old rocking chair. But in a storm the noise is more like fusillades of musket-fire, or like the rending of a tree being torn from the ground by its roots.

Each ragged fusillade is followed by an uneasy silence, as the ship reaches the end of its roll, and the tensions slacken. Then the noise breaks out again as it sways back - again and again.

Someone who knew the Rose well would probably understand quite clearly from these sounds what the ship was doing. Two decks below the action, you can plainly hear the rattle of heavy blocks, transmitted through the fabric of the hull, when topsail sheets or halyards are in action. The jolting detonations when the big sails flap echo down to us if a gust takes us aback.

Chatter from crew members on the gun deck overhead carries news down to us in snatches, and every hour is marked by the night-watchman visit of the watch member on boat check duty, flashing a torch through spyholes in the floor to see whether the bilge needs pumping out.

When the ship wears round or switches tack, its sleepers are gently nudged by gravity from one side of their bunks to the other, and adjust their pose perhaps without even waking.

But for novices, these underwater sounds are hard to read. One night we had been punching to windward through heavy seas. Every wave cuffed the bow savagely, and every timber in the hull seemed to be shrieking in protest. Rose is not comfortable in head winds.

Next morning I woke to relative silence and peace. There was only a long, slow roll. I came on deck expecting to find us becalmed, with sails slatting in a useless swell.

On the contrary, I saw sails taut as boards in a following wind of breathtaking power - a following gale already approaching 50 knots. Double reefed topsails and fore course were driving us downwind at eleven knots, and the ship's bulldozer bow was curling aside a wide avenue of foam. But the hull inside was not complaining. Now the ship was comfortable: these were the conditions she was made for.