Dulcibella

This oil, Fetching Water, by Martyn Mackerill depicts an event in Erskine Childers’ 1903 classic, The Riddle of the Sands.

The book is a great spy story, one of the earliest, and like Arthur Ransome’s novels has a lot of sailing content. The two masted boat is a converted wooden lifeboat of seven tons, so about thirty feet. It has been decked over, given a centreboard and re-rigged as a yawl by its fictional owner, Davies.   But Dulcibella, called after Childers’ sister, is closely based on his own sailing boat, Vixen. Davies’ innocent companion in the book is the inexperienced Carruthers who doesn’t know anything about sailing and had imagined a large, comfortable yacht with a crew: my kind of sailor.

“She seemed very small (in point of fact she was seven tons), something over thirty feet in length and nine in beam, a size very suitable to week-ends in the Solent, for such as liked that sort of thing; but that she should have come from Dover to the Baltic suggested a world of physical endeavour of which I had never dreamed.” (The Riddle of the Sands)

Childers described his real-life Vixen in Yachting Monthly Magazine thus:

“To start with, no one could call Vixen beautiful. We grew to love her in the end, but never to admire her. At first I did not even love her for she was a pis aller, bought in a hurry in default of a better, and a week spent fitting her for cruising – a new era for her – had somehow not cemented our affections.”

(Pis aller: a course of action followed as a last resort.)

The novel is set in the shallow tidal waters of the East Frisian Islands; a chain of islands in the North Sea, off the coast of East Frisia in Lower Saxony, Germany. Davies’ skill as a yachtsman in these tidal mudflats is a central plot point. Childers’ vivid descriptions were gained when he took Vixen there.