Captain Voss and Tilikum

Capt. J.C. Voss

Capt. J.C. Voss, one of history's greatest small-boat sailors, was also one of its least pleasant.

A lifelong mariner, Voss was a Canadian, living in Victoria, BC, in 1901. He was intrigued by Joshua Slocum's first-ever solo circumnavigation of the globe in a small boat between 1895 and 1889, and by the success of his book Sailing Alone Around the World in 1900. When Norman Luxton, a journalist, proposed teaming up for a similar trip in a smaller boat than Slocum's Spray, Voss agreed. As Luxton had no sailing experience, Voss would handle things nautical, while Luxton would document the voyage.

Tilikum in Samoa. (CLICK ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE)

Voss purchased a large red cedar dugout canoe from a Nootka Indian on Vancouver Island, describing in The Venturesome Voyages Of Captain Voss how he got the seller drunk in order to obtain better terms and, in doing so, knowingly broke Canadian law. To prepare it for sea duty, he substantially modified the boat, raising the topsides, adding a cabin and cockpit, installing frames, floors, keelson, keel, water tanks, fixed and movable ballast, rudder and tiller, and a rig consisting of three small stayed masts, a jib, gaff sails on the foremast and mainmast and a leg-o'-mutton sail on the mizzen. Named Tilikum ("friend"), the boat was 38' LOA and 5'6" in beam.

Tilikum in New Zealand.

Leaving Victoria, the two made their first stop on Vancouver Island, where they looted an Indian burial cave for "curios" (including human bones) to sell later on their journey. This was no abandoned burial site: it was actively venerated by the local people, but Voss seems to have thought nothing of the ethics of his action, evidently assuming that Indian sensibilities were irrelevant and that being white gave him a prerogative in this area.

At Penrhyn Island, their first landfall in the Pacific, Voss assumed that the natives would be dangerous cannibals. Before entering the small harbor, he and Luxton fortified their cockpit with sandbags and prepared their guns (there were at least four aboard) to repel boarders. It turned out that the natives were perfectly friendly, having been satisfactorily "civilized" by a European missionary. As the voyage continued and further contacts were made with numerous non-European cultures, this inherent distrust seemed to diminish, though not Voss's disdain.

Tilikum under all plain sail. (Image from Wikipedia.)

Luxton proved to be a bad sailor, and he left Tilikum in Sydney, Australia. He was replaced by a succession of substitute mates, none of them lasting very long. Apparently, Voss was an unpleasant shipmate. On one passage, his mate disappeared -- swept overboard in a storm, according to Voss's account, although some have speculated that Voss murdered him.

Voss made many stops in Australia, displaying the boat and giving lectures to fund the ongoing voyage. Next, he went to New Zealand, where he again entered upon the lecture circuit. An incident there is worth quoting at length:

A splendid critique in the next morning's newspapers  (in Wellington) served as an instigation to us to speak on several succeeding occasions to full houses, and at the request of a white Maori chief from Palmerston North, a fair inland city, we put the boat on a train and, in company of the chief, journeyed overland to that place. In the country surrounding Palmerston live many Maori farmers who came to town by the hundred (sic) to give us a call. They were more than pleased to see a canoe which had crossed the ocean to their country, and the fact apparently strengthened their belief that in days of yore their ancestors had emigrated in large canoes to New Zealand from some distant region of the Pacific. One Maori, who spoke English fluently, told me that he had never credited the legend, as he thought it impossible to cross the ocean in such frail craft. "And now, as I see with my own eyes that you have covered thousands of miles in this Indian canoe and have arrived safely on our shores, I do not longer question that my forefathers can have accomplished the same!"

The maps show the rest of his voyage, which he completed in England in 1904, three years and three months after it began. While he did not return to the west coast of North America, he used the term "circumnavigation" to describe his voyage, on the rationale that he had crossed the three major oceans.

Voss and Tilikum weathered some horrendous storms, often relying on a sea anchor -- a device in which Voss was a firm believer and great champion. He was undoubtedly a seaman of great skill, and his choice of boat and the way in which he outfitted it demonstrate superb insight into small craft design for ocean voyaging.

Tilikum is now on display in the Maritime Museum of British Columbia.

The Egyptian Aiyassa

Continuing our observations from The Last Sailors: The Final Days of Working Sail by Neil Hollander and Harald Mertes, let's look at the Egyptian aiyassa, which is not at all related to the boats of ancient dynastic Egypt. The aiyassa is the characteristic big bulk carrier of the Nile, and when the book was published in 1984, there were still thousands of them in commercial use. Hollander states that the hull form was based on the Portuguese galleass (from which the word aiyassa is derived), and so strictly speaking, I shouldn't be addressing it, as it's from the Western tradition, but one look at the huge lateen rig, and I think that most readers will cut me slack.

Anyway, Hollander's aiyassa is a big boat for a river sailing craft -- the big ones weighed in at over 100 tons. They sported huge lateen rigs, with the tip of the boom soaring 100 feet in the air. They also carried a mizzen -- the word for the mizzen, by the way, being the same as in English, since it was an Arabic term to start with. The mainsail rig weighs close to a ton, and in The Last Sailors, it took four men a half hour to raise it, using tremendously crude machinery. In the author's observation, everything aboard was in a constant state of disintegration, and this is borne out by Mertes' photos, which show every bit of the rig pieced together with innumerable, horribly unshipshape knots and splices. There is no pride of seamanship or sentiment here -- the boat being viewed simply as an inexpensive tool with which to do a job.

Aiyassas carry bulk goods like hay and bricks. In 1984, the upriver (i.e., southbound) trade in finished goods had dried up, being overtaken by road and rail transport, so the boats would travel upriver empty, and only return to Cairo with cargoes. They would sail south on the prevailing breeze, and drift north with the current, essentially out of control, moving astern, abeam -- however the current wished to take them. Extremely beamy, the craft are regularly loaded to the utmost limits of their capacity, so that they ride with mere inches of freeboard. Since they're drifting downstream when laden, there seems to be little or no chance of heeling and shipping water over the gunwale, but in the "old days," when they ran upriver laden and under sail, this may not have been the case. They are, however, extremely beamy, providing a great deal of heeling resistance, even with their huge rigs.

Most boats, it seems, were owned by small merchants in Cairo, in fleets of a few boats. Crews were paid $114 a month, which I interpret as meaning the salary not for individual crew members, but the whole crew. (On the boat described, there were four crew members, including the captain.) Even in 1984, they were being displaced by diesel-powered, steel-hulled boats called sandals, and now I can't find anything about aiyassas by Googling, or on Wikipedia. Hard to believe they've disappeared not only from the river but also from the written record, so I have to presume that they're also known by another name, whether or not they're still in use. Can't even find photos by Googling "Nile Sailboat"-- only lots of photos of feluccas, which are much smaller craft. If anyone can point me to a good photo that I could borrow without infringing somebody's rights, please let me know and I'll post it here.

Finally, don't be misled by the ancient Egyptian boats in the links below -- they are unrelated to the aiyassa, but pretty interesting nonetheless.