Lee Rail Under

SAIL Ho! (288 pp.)--Sir James Bisset, written in collaboration with P. R. Stephensen--Criterion ($5).

The bark County of Pembroke was running her easting down in the roaring forties off the Cape of Good Hope when she shipped a monstrous sea over the lee rail. Tailing onto the heavy rope of the main brace was a runty, down-cheeked lad of 16 named Jimmy Bisset. His feet swept from under him by the surge of boiling green water, he was washed overboard. His shouts were drowned in the roar of wind and sea. But he held onto the rope's end. And the next sea washed him back aboard. As Jimmy clutched the fife rail and spat out the brine, the first mate roared: "The next time you do a thing like that, I'll log you for attempting to desert ship!''

There was no such next time, and young Bisset graduated from sail to steam, eventually (1944) became the gold-encrusted commodore of the Cunard-White Star Line and successively master of the world's greatest sea queens, Mary and Elizabeth. Now 75 and living in well-fed Australian retirement, Sir James Gordon Partridge Bisset sits in the lee of the longboat and spins a salty yarn of life in an oldtime square-rigger. On his first voyage, Bisset was seasick. The mate gave him an old-fashioned cure: a pannikin of sea water poured down his protesting gullet. Though he has never been seasick since, Commodore Bisset notes ruefully: "I have always hesitated to recommend this old-fashioned remedy to passengers in luxury liners." Another old remedy was devised for Bisset's dysentery. The captain's remedies were numbered, and No. 15 was for dysentery. But the captain ran out of it. So he gave the green-faced Jimmy an arithmetically compounded dollop of No. 5 and No. 10. It worked.

Bisset had six years in sail, scrambling out on the swaying yards to clew up a topgallant sail, growing calluses on his knees from holystoning the wooden decks with "Bibles" (big stones) and "prayer books" (little ones). Though experiences in a square-rigger would seem to be of small use to the master of a modern liner, Bisset insists there is no better training. Any man in sail had to learn to make right decisions instantly, he argues. That Jimmy Bisset learned his lesson well is shown by his accident-free later service. On the Queen Mary he carried as many as 15,000 U.S. soldiers at a clip through the Atlantic's sub-infested waters, ferried Winston Churchill to rendezvous with President Franklin D. Roosevelt--enough adventure for another volume. When Cambridge University gave him an LL.D., its orator called him "navigatorum principem, tempestatum hostiumque irrisorem" --prince of navigators and scorner of danger, from both storm and foe.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.