‘THE natives, pleasant, humorous and healthy, are very nearly white, or appear so, and are busy workers. The majority of the women, in my opinion, are very good-looking, intelligent and, in some cases I have seen, with perfectly clean-cut features.” Small wonder that Sidney Lavelle, the author of the dispatch to this newspaper, was fired by his skipper, who shoved “a steerage ticket by the next boat” into his hand in Capetown, South Africa, and told him to “get the hell out of it”.
That was just a few weeks after publication of Lavelle's above impressions of Brazil's Pernambuco port in The Irish Timeson November 3rd, 1923. By then the skipper, Limerick man Conor O'Brien, had had enough of both of his crew, with whom he had left Kingstown (as Dún Laoghaire was then known), to attempt the first Irish circumnavigation by small yacht around the world.
Cablegram dispatches from Lavelle during the voyage had been published in The Irish Timesfrom early July, 1923, but the accounts had played down tensions on board. After all, a preview of the voyage noted "there is something irresistibly romantic in the thought of this little cockle shell of a boat . . . setting sail on a voyage that is likely to make yachting history".
The Baltimore-built yacht would “not hug the coast, as one might have expected”, the newspaper noted. It would “strike boldly out into the vasty deep, making her first call at Madeira, and thence taking a bee-line for Cape Town”.
And the “vasty” deep was an irresistible magnet for O’Brien, seasoned sailor and barefoot mountaineer, architect and founder of Dublin’s United Arts Club, gun-runner with Erskine Childers and grandson of nationalist politician William Smith O’Brien.
He was also an accomplished writer. In his autobiographical work, From Three Yachts, he compared the different sounds of water when sailing or climbing. The climber hears "the patter of drops falling from a projecting rock, the rumbling of the river echoing up the valley . . ." For the sailor,the sound is of the "ripple of the tide . . . the splash as the lines are cast off . . . the gentle hissing of foam along the ship's bows", and all play their part in the "full orchestra of the ocean", he wrote.
Perhaps it went with the territory, for Nova Scotia-born sailor Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail solo around the world in 1895-98, was also a fine writer and his trip account is regarded as a classic of travel literature. While O’Brien had up to 16 different crew in all by the time he had finished his voyage, (including his sister Kitty for the last leg), he was first to sail south of the three capes.
His was also the first boat to do so with the new Irish Tricolour. Mind you, that bit wasn’t easy. Writing in this newspaper on November 1st, 1923, O’Brien described how a “valiant attempt” had been made to show the Irish flag in the Brazilian port of Pernambuco, but “local press persisted to the last in describing us as English naval officers, and locating Dublin in England”.
Judith Hill has trawled through Irish Timesarchives and other sources for her new account of O'Brien's life, which has just been published. His life story has already been told in Irish by Padraic de Bhaldraithe, in Loingseoir na Saoirse, published by Coiscéim, and further researched by designer and boatbuilder Gary McMahon who has been restoring another O'Brien boat, the Ilen.
Hill’s starting point is O’Brien’s background as a member of the ascendancy family which ruled Thomond from the mid-10th century. Influenced by his unorthodox aunt, Charlotte Grace, a writer and social reformer, O’Brien was reared in Britain, but began coming to Ireland more frequently when training to be an architect.
By this time he had taken up climbing – among his friends was George Mallory, the mountaineer who disappeared with Andrew Irvine on Everest in 1924, and poet Robert Graves. The poet was fascinated by O’Brien’s ability to climb barefoot – “mesmerised”, as Hill notes. O’Brien took Mallory climbing on Mount Brandon and sailing off the Kerry coast in 1913.
In 1914, together with Erskine Childers, owner of Asgard, O'Brien used his yacht Kelpieto land guns at Kilcoole, Co Wicklow, as part of Roger Casement's plan. However, he then took a course in minesweeping as part of the British naval reserve after the outbreak of the first World War. He was given command of a fishing trawler which had been converted to hunt for mines, and recorded how he was forced to sail with "the most amazing collection of incompetents".
Returning to Ireland after the war, he proposed a strategy to stimulate the fishing industry, but it proved disastrous, set against the backdrop of civil war.
By this stage, however, he was planning construction of the ketch which was to permit him, as this newspaper described it, to “put a girdle around the globe”.
Some 10,000 people attended his homecoming to Dun Laoghaire after the epic circumnavigation in 1925, with his two sisters, Kitty and Margaret – both keen sailors – on board. “O’Brien emerged in dark glasses,” Hill writes. “He was cheered and carried shoulder-high as people pressed around. He was met by members of the Dun Laoghaire Urban District Council and then driven into Dublin in a procession of 100 motor cars headed by one carrying a model of Saoirse with his young godson, Conor Cruise O’Brien, dressed in a white sailor suit posing as Conor. That evening the Arts Club hosted a gala dinner.”
The author wonders why a man of so many parts and so honoured in yachting circles has been largely forgotten by others. In Search of Islands: a life of Conor O'Brien, redresses that. Published by Collins Press with wonderful illustrations at €29.99