Trading Places

A charter party hired sailing barge Cambria to experience fi rst hand what crews faced in the days of sail. Former mates Phil ‘Ginger’ Latham and Dick Durham joined them aboard Britain’s last sailing merchant ship

- Dick Durham

It was appropriate the wind was blowing northeasterly as the spring rain dimpled the Blackwater estuary, for a breeze in this quarter has for centuries held northbound trading vessels within

the confines of the Thames Estuary. Out in the river, Cambria’s bob fluttered furiously at

the truck of her topmast as Richard Titchener, head of the Sea Change Sailing Trust and, today, skipper of the last trading sailing vessel to fly the red ensign, nosed the heavy barge skiff into the rusty old lighter, which serves as a pontoon at Heybridge Basin, Essex.

Here waited a charterparty of folks eager to discover what it was like to sail in an engineless trading ship, among them myself and Phil ‘Ginger’ Latham, both, at different times, former mates of the Cambria, invited back aboard to help bring the experience alive.

Once the passengers were alongside the barge they had a wooden ladder to clamber up on deck: in our day a foothold on a half-lowered lee-board would have sufficed.

Bags stowed, it was time to get under way: the barge was just starting to swing down river and the ebb tide would help her over the headwind.

Firstly, a few cloths of mainsail were dropped as the mate, Hilary Halajko, let the main brail run and the mainsheet block was dragged aft and hooked onto the traveller running across the giant horizontal ‘tree’ of oak, which is the main horse.

Ginger watched as Richard moused the hook to prevent the block becoming unhitched.

“Bob never did that,” he commented, referring to Bob Roberts, the legendary sailor who was the last skipper to trade under sail alone. “It was too difficult to get a wet lashing off in an emergency.” However, as Ginger would later candidly recall, there was one occasion when a mousing would have served the barge well.