From Vancouver’s pine-dark rim where Pacific rollers boom,
A Royal Navy Thirty-Two stood out beneath a gull-grey gloom;
Her yards were squared to southern airs, her pennant snapped like flame,
And Halifax lay far ahead, a star without a name;
No consort shared her outward road, no friendly mast in sight,
Only the heave of iron swells and old oak fading white;
Thus south she drove with measured pride and guns in ordered tier,
A wooden will with canvas lungs and discipline for gear.
Down long American coasts she ran where fog and sunlight veer,
Past headlands torn by winter surf and currents cold and clear;
Yet when she met the Chilean reach and Humboldt’s stubborn breath,
The wind stood firm against her course and promised toil and death;
So board by board and tack by tack she clawed her Southern way,
Her lee rail buried deep in green that burst in blinding spray;
The shrouds they shrieked, the topmasts bowed, the helmsman fought the strain,
As if the very shore conspired to drive her back again.
Valparaíso’s terraced heights shone amber through the haze,
A brief reprieve of lanterned quays and measured dockyard ways;
There water casks were filled anew and salted beef brought down,
While caulkers sought each opened seam with mallet’s ringing sound;
But south beyond the harbour mouth the Horn in darkness lay,
A fang of rock in spume and sleet that guards the meeting way;
No ship that dreams of easy berth or captain soft of hand,
May hope to win that gate of storms that ocean’s do command.
Then into roaring latitudes she thrust her bowsprit bare,
Where spindrift scuds like driven ash through needle-frozen air;
September’s westerlies unbound came howling from the snow,
With sleet that flayed the cheek to blood and ice in every blow;
Men aloft in reefing gangs clung black against the sky,
Their oilskins stiff with rime and frost as frozen seas went by;
The storm-jib cracked, the topsails reefed were hammered thin and small,
While green seas climbed the quarterdeck like battlements to fall.
Round Horn she fought from Pacific wrath to the Atlantic roar,
The compass reeling circles at each sea’s thundering war;
Following seas in mountainous ranks pursued her straining stern,
Each comber bent on boarding her with weight no keel could turn;
So small she steered with cunning helm and watchful seaman’s art,
Lest one vast sea should poop her decks and rend her frame apart;
Through spume that burst like shattered glass and snow that stung like shot,
She won the eastward heave at last from that accursèd spot.
No cheer was raised when Horn lay dim beyond the boiling waste,
For every plank and spar had felt the tempest’s savage haste;
The carpenter with adze and oak made good the tortured seams,
While pumps beat slow and weary time to leaking southern dreams;
Thus north for gentler parallels her battered hull she laid,
With men grown lean from frozen watch and courage sorely weighed;
Yet in their eyes a steadier fire than tropic suns may show
Burned from the trial none may feign who has not faced that foe.
At Rio’s noble harbour mouth beneath the Sugarloaf,
She dropped her hook in waters calm where trading vessels loaf;
There freshened stores and river-sweet were hoisted from the quay,
And British factors marked her scars with grave approval’s eye;
For empire’s threads are spun in ports where weary ships refit,
And strength is husbanded ashore as much as deck and pit;
Renewed in spar and salted flesh she took the northerly sweep,
To seek the coral citadel that guards the western deep.
At Bermuda’s ring of reef and foam where winter stations lie,
She found the ordered anchorage beneath a tempered sky;
Signals dipped and ledgers closed, the dockyard hands made fast,
And news of Halifax was passed from forecastle to mast;
The North Atlantic’s sterner breath already touched the air,
Yet after Horn and southern sleet such winds were almost fair;
So on she pressed for Nova Scotia’s granite-fringed embrace,
With two hundred days behind her wake in patient, salted trace.
The Captain, pacing quarterdeck beneath a paling sun,
Surveyed the scarred yet steadfast hull and knew the voyage done;
For timber bends and canvas splits and iron bolts may start,
But something harder, truer still is forged in ship and heart;
From Vancouver’s wooded silence to Halifax’s tide,
Through spume and sleet and tacking war where bitter westerlies ride,
A lone frigate proved in storm and sea what mortal wills endure,
That steadfast course through contrary winds is courage made secure.
(By John Shenton)