Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter Two
From mustard seeds come great deeds.
I meet my first mate.
As children, my twin brother, Gavin, and I had played great, imaginary games at the bottom
of our large wild garden in South Africa. They would involve seagoing boats and ships, pir-
ates, and wild, romantic, tropical places in faraway lands. We had dragged a large old log
with the help of Jack, our ever patient black gardener, across a big, leafy, compost pit, and
this became our beautiful, big, pirate ship with tall, wooden masts, black rigging, ropes of
such complexity, and bulging, white sails. Great wars were won and lost; dangerous oceans
were crossed, and the smells and sounds of spice islands invaded our playground. To us it
was real and so close at hand. How wonderful it was to have a twin brother as a playmate
with such unlimited imagination!
Later, as a young boy, the schooner emblem on the well known Robertson's Spice bottle
stirred something in me: the word “spice” and the sight of the mast-studded ship caught my
eye, and I would stare at the bottle as it transported me back to another time. In my mind's
eye or heart's eye, I could distinctly see tall ships huddled together on misty wharfs, gang
planks alive with stevedores trundling off barrels of cargo, spices, coffee, tea, ivory, and
whatever else. There was noise: orders being yelled, trolley wheels squeaking, boys yelling
excitedly to their friends, dogs barking at new faces, and the smell of ocean, fish, and cargo,
cooking smells from the galleys, and decaying garbage in the gutter. I had pictured the scene
vividly a thousand times before: it was the past calling me to another time.
When I was ten, my father booked our family on a large mail ship, the Edinburgh Castle.
We steamed our way across the Atlantic from South Africa's lovely Table Bay to the Canary
Islands, disembarking finally in England. We stopped off for a day at the quaint island of
Madeira, where some local sailors arrived in little skiffs equipped with very tall masts which
enabled these merchants to skinny up to the upper decks with their wares. All sorts of home-
made items and produce were sold: little guitars and ukuleles, ladies' fans and umbrellas,
paintings of the island, bunches of purple grapes, bottles of famous Madeira port, and so
forth.
Some of these very young bronzed sailors were fabulous divers and would thrill the de-
lighted passengers by diving into the purple sea for coins thrown down from the decks
above. A few daredevils even dived under the huge boat's keel and came up on the other
side. It was rumored that divers would stuff cheese into the engine's water cooling intakes
to prolong the ship's stay. Gavin and I loved every minute of the cruise to and from Eng-
land; we would spend hours exploring the vast ship, sneaking into places that were strictly
