“All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”

John Masefield

One of the many fallacies muttered about the English is that they’ve all got salt water in their veins, that they’ve got hearts of oak and that they are therefore natural born mariners. As children they’ve had pointed out to them by parents and teachers alike the deeds of such folk heroes as Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, as Martin Frobisher and James Cook, as Horatio Nelson plus, of course, the great navigator George Vancouver. There is seldom mention made of Henry Hudson, who didn’t quite survive due to an incident in some bay or other, nor of Wallace Welliboot, who drowned ignominiously five feet from shore on his maiden voyage from Plymouth. The fact that Rear Admiral Viscount Lord Mal Demer chucked up daily on his journey to The Admiralty as he crossed the stormy Thames at Tower Bridge has been stricken from all the records.

The fact is: nobody remembers the thousands of Englishmen who were drowned, ship-wrecked, eaten by cannibals or sharks or abducted by dusky maidens on far-away shores and thus never made it home in order to pose for statues of themselves.

Our daughter has researched my family and discovered that some of my ancestors were sea-farers but my Uncle Charlie, the only member of my family that I know actually went to sea was sunk twice by most unfriendly u-boats. He was noted for his rolling walk, his jolly-tar way of talking and incipient mildew.

Most Englishmen are noted for blocked nasal passages and a funny way of talking, their rheumaticky joints and the mold in their undies. For example, when Second Lieutenant Albert Wiginbotham retired from the navy, he resolved to walk inland with an oar over his shoulder until someone asked what it was. “I settle right there,” he said. Sad to say, he only made it half-way up the main street when an urchin called out, “Wotcher got there, mate? A water ski?” Second lieutenant, R.N. ret. Wiginbotham spent the last years of his life breathing salt-laden air filled with the aroma of frying fish and chips whilst beating off persistent rot.

Personally, I know of only one friend who actually sailed — without pay or conscription — out of sight of land, on the briny deep whilst endeavouring to stay on the top of it. But he’s bonkers.

So I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I once felt the tug of the tides, the call of the gulls and strum of a strong nor’westerly. I did manage to ignore this for years until I considered buying a vessel for myself but, as I live six million fathoms — or is that knots? — from the salt chuck, I gave up the idea and built my own vessels. Besides, as an acquaintance informed me, ‘A boat is a hole in the water into which one tosses money’. King Henry VIII was apparently aware of this as his prize warship, the Mary Rose, tipped over in front of him.

So I built my own fine craft, cheaply.

Being English, I didn’t bother with plans for my stout vessels and merely used the scrap wood I could scrounge. My beloved sewed sails from leftover sofa coverings and I purchased the rigging at great expense at the local hardware stores, thus boosting the economy.

Over the years I’ve been pooped on Wasa, taken aback on Jimsmith, capsized on Peckham’s, run aground on Columbia, demasted in a gale on Windermere and sunk ignominiously with all hands — both of us — on the broad expanse of Kootenay Lake.

The rumour that local archaeologists and divers have recovered several of my wrecks and are attempting to reassemble some for the museum at Fort Steele is not strictly true.

But my inbred Englishness is still evident. I do have salt in my veins. I also have a funny accent, even after fifty years in the colonies. My knees creak with rheumatism, there is still that far-away look in my rheumy eyes and that growth of mold in my undies.