Preface
In the 1880s sailing was still a young sport in Germany. Rowing clubs counted their members in thousands; yacht owners on the Baltic and the North Sea could be counted by name, and many of them knew one another. When one of them brought a boat home from England, or took a club cutter along the Pomeranian coast to a regatta, the account of it went to Wassersport, the Berlin weekly that served both sports. These accounts were written for readers who might do the same next summer. So they are full of bearings, barometer readings, prices and warnings, and also of the pleasures that made the trouble worth it. This volume collects them.
The first volume, Under Oar, contained the voyages made under oar and paddle on inland water. This second volume contains the voyages made under sail. Most of them are at sea, in the Baltic and the North Sea; one is a winter on the Riviera, and one a delivery from Southampton to Kiel in autumn. The book follows the journal roughly in the order the voyages were made, from 1878 to 1895. Two logs show how a Hamburg and a Berlin yacht got to the Kiel regatta before the North Sea–Baltic Canal was cut. One chapter is a single October day in an open boat off Danzig that ran on into the small hours. The students of the Akademischer Segler-Verein appear twice with their old cutter Matador, in 1886 and 1892. Two reports from the yearbook of the navy’s sailing club bring the Emperor’s new Meteor and Prince Heinrich’s Irène from the Clyde to Kiel in 1891, and in the same weeks a Breton yachtsman with one fisherman brings a three-ton racing cutter from Belfast to Roscoff. The book ends with the summer of 1894, when there were more yachts at sea than ever before. A Watson six-tonner was brought from Hamburg to Kiel and raced at Swinemünde and Malmö. A flat Berlin yacht went to Kiel Week. Rowing men from Halle sailed a small centreboard boat down the Saale and the Elbe to the Havel lakes. A Weser cutter felt her way among the East Frisian islands to Hamburg. And a navy pinnace, rigged as a cutter, sailed out of Wilhelmshaven.
The rules of choice are those of the first volume. Only finished accounts in which something happens have been included. Race reports, club news, plans for cruises that were never reported, and serials broken off before the end have been left out, however promising. The texts are given in full, apart from a few digressions, mostly lists of anchorages and a stretch of one cruise already told from another boat in an earlier chapter. Each such omission is marked by a bracketed note where it occurs.
The writers were sailors, not authors: a professional seaman, a French yachtsman, naval officers, a Weser clubman, members of a Königsberg club, Berlin students who signed themselves with nicknames. They were often careless with dates, and once or twice with the name of a month. Every figure that matters has been checked against the page image of the journal, since a scan read by machine turns a 3 into an 8 as easily as a wave turns a boat. Where the original is plainly wrong, the text is left as printed and a footnote says so. Their charts and lights have long been replaced, their harbours rebuilt, and their yachts broken up. What remains is the feeling these pages record: a reef taken in too late, a night at anchor listening to the chain, and the first sight of a lighthouse where the reckoning said it would be.
— L. Dudakov
