Annette Brock Davis

From a very early age, Annette Brock was determined that she was going to make the sea her profession. Not an obvious choice for a middle-class girl in Montreal in the inter-war years, but she obviously didn't give up easily: she was turned down by many potential employers before she managed to persuade the Finnish shipowner Gustav Erikson to take her on as apprentice in one of his sailing ships on the 1933 grain run to Australia. The same firm took on the English teenager Eric Newby a few years later, an experience he describes in The last grain race (1956). ABD didn't get around to writing an account of her own voyage until she was in her eighties, and she may have borrowed a little more from Newby than she realised (she doesn't mention his book). Although it's not all that surprising that bad weather, rust chipping, pidgin Swedish, and the shock of being dropped into a world where violence is never very far below the surface should be common themes in both books.

Of course there are plenty of “before the mast” memoirs, and the really interesting thing about this one is Brock’s experience of working as a woman in what was then and for a long time afterwards one of the most hallowed male spaces anywhere, among a bunch of rough seamen of assorted nationalities, not noticeably more refined than those Newby sailed with. They certainly didn't welcome her intrusion, but by her own account she did manage to win a grudging acceptance from them that she could do her fair share of work.

The ship she sailed on, the former Belgian training ship L’Avenir, carried some passengers - an exotic assortment including Percy and Ella Grainger and the second-generation Bloomsburyite Barbara Strachey - so Brock wasn't quite the only woman on board, and there are occasionally passages where we shift bizarrely into a kind of The Voyage Out atmosphere. And a wonderful scene where Grainger plays for the rapt crew in the sailroom. We probably shouldn't take it all too literally, but it must have been quite an experience.

Erikson offered Brock a job on another ship after her first voyage, and her intention was to qualify for her second mate’s certificate, which would have needed four years of certified sea experience. Sadly, she didn't get to complete this plan, as her family managed to recapture her and divert her back into respectability at the critical moment, and the rest of her life seems to have been spent conventionally enough as wife, mother, and marine artist. But she clearly took a great pleasure in later life in staying in touch with her old shipmates and going to Cape-Horner reunions.… (altro)