Eight Bells And Top Masts

Diaries from a Tramp Steamer.

On a winter's morning in the late 1950s, an old tramp ship set sail from Amsterdam for the Far East. For nearly two years, she would tramp from port to port, never quite knowing where the next cargo might be, or where it would be taken; a sea-going man-with-a-van grubbing for trade. From the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, to the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, to China, the Pacific islands and eventually, back to Europe she sailed - a complete circumnavigation of the globe.

Aboard her was a young lad from the Kent marshes. He simply wanted to go to sea. He wanted to tie knots, to splice and bend ropes. He wanted the rattle of an anchor running out in a foreign sound. A loner who sought the company of a ship rather than fellows. He and the trampship became firm friends. Faithfully, in old school notebooks, the lad recorded what he saw, what he felt and what he did: moments of magic and the moments of fear.

But he'd joined a dying ship, a dying way of life. The old tramping trade was coming to an end at the same time that the British flag was being hauled down on Britain's colonial history. No more Conrad.

'Eight Bells And Top Masts' is the often moving and often hilarious diary of that epic voyage and its lad's own awakening form youth to adulthood, in a way of life that he'd been told was forever - but was not.