The strange tale of Captain Jack and the Great Adventure is the sort of story that would once have been made into a film by Ealing Studios. It is full of very English characters – the boatload of unlikely rebels striking out for freedom, the country vicar who joins them, the village policeman who helps them, and the man from the ministry who pursues them with his big book of little rules – and underneath all the slapstick and sentiment, the film would simply have asserted what every romantic rebel knows, that there is a special kind of freedom in daring to be different.
The central character would have to have been Captain Jack Lammiman, aged 63, the white-bearded old sea dog with his navy blue cap on the back of his head and his pipe permanently angled out of the corner of his mouth. The opening scene would have been the ancient harbour town of Whitby, on the north east coast of Yorkshire, where the camera would have panned past the jumble of rooftops, down through the seagulls and the rigging, onto the oak deck of a 60-foot twin-masted schooner, the Helga Maria, where, one day, a year or so ago, Captain Jack was sitting, as usual, watching the town go by and chewing over the meaning of life with his mates.
The talk this day happened to turn to William Scoresby, whaler, philosopher, explorer, son of Whitby and, in the eyes of Captain Jack and his friends, a hero unjustly shunted into oblivion by the town. Scoresby deserved to be remembered, they said. They should do something themselves to restore his memory, they said. But what? That was when Captain Jack had an idea which soon caught his imagination like a lobster in a pot. They would sail the Helga Maria to the site of William Scoresby’s greatest feats, northwards, beyond the horizon – to the Arctic!
It was a powerful idea. Captain Jack, who is 63, had spent a life at sea, he had been up beyond the Arctic Circle in merchant ships and he knew the dangers, but he had no doubt that the Helga Maria could cope with the journey. Soon he had a crew of volunteers: two elderly widows named Pat and Edna; a 68-year-old retired welder called Eric; a big-bearded Scotsman called Dave who had met Jack at a bus stop; and the vicar of St Hilda’s in near-by Egton, the Rev Paul Burkett, who shared Jack’s love of philosophy. Lynda Jackson, who runs a caravan site, offered to run communications from the telephone in her sitting room. This was the beginning of the Great Adventure.
Captain Jack did not pretend the journey would be easy. The Arctic was as perilous now as it had been in Scoresby’s day: ice packs that would crush the hull of the strongest vessel, terrible storms that howled up from the Caribbean and battered themselves to death against the frozen mountains, killer whales, polar bears, the sheer, helpless emptiness of it all. They weren’t worried. They agreed they would sail 1,300 miles to Jan Mayen Island, where a mountain had been named after Scoresby, and lay a memorial plaque for him there. The more they planned, the more urgently they wanted to go.
The truth was that this was no longer just about William Scoresby. He was a fine enough fellow – a brave adventurer who had caught more whales than any other man, 533 of them, at a time when whaling involved clambering into a small boat on a churning sea to hurl a wooden harpoon into the sea giant. He was a Christian and a humanitarian, an inventor (he invented the crow’s nest), a founder of the Whitby Philosophical Society, and an eccentric to boot with a pet polar bear on a leash. But great as William Scoresby was, there was now something greater at stake for Captain Jack and his crew.
Each of them was trapped by different circumstances – by shortage of money, by old age, by conventions and rules – but each of them wanted a chance to break out, to take a risk, to find themselves, to dare to be different. This was not just a wild idea, this was all about freedom.
They bought provisions, they examined maps, they pored over library books and by the beginning of July this year, they were ready to go. Just then, just as their enthusiasm was bubbling like fat in the pan, the inspector called. Inspector Brian McAree worked for the Department of Transport. He was charged with certain statutory responsibilities under the Merchant Shipping Act, 1894. He wished to inspect the Helga Maria. And he had to advise Captain Lammiman that he was not at all happy with what he saw.
The ship’s bell was only four inches in diameter; regulations stated that it should have been six. The whistle was made in Denmark; it did not meet British specifications. There was not enough sand in the fire buckets. The emergency flares might work perfectly well but they were beyond the legally correct age. The life jackets, according to the latest rulings, should have been marked with retroflective tape. The inspector said it was not good enough. And so, using the powers of compliance and detention vested in him by the Department of Transport, he filled out form DET3 and forbade her to sail. She was, in his official view, unfit for the oceans.
Captain Jack was not so much irritated as insulted on the old schooner’s behalf. But for all his roving ways, he had always believed in law and order and so, pocketing his pride, he thanked the inspector for his kind assistance, spent £1,060 on flares and bells and buckets of sand, and, a few days later, he called the inspector’s office to say that the Helga Maria was now ready for a second visit to prove her worth. The inspector, however, was busy. The next day, Captain Jack called again. The inspector, however, was unavailable. Finally, the inspector declared that Jack must fill in a new form and be prepared to pay him £37 an hour including travelling time to visit the Helga Maria.
Captain Jack and the crew grew impatient. The boat was safe; all she lacked was a piece of paper to say so. They filled in the new form, and still they heard nothing. With every day that passed, the Arctic winter moved a little closer. Soon, the weather would be too bad for them. Perhaps this was all a ruse to stop them sailing. Was their sprint for freedom to be tripped up by red tape? Were they to spend the rest of their lives without adventure? The answer was No.
Twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the Whitby trawlers put to sea. On Wednesday evening, July 31 1991, as the trawlers drifted gently out through the harbour mouth with a sea mist thickening around their bows, there was a stranger in the fleet. The Helga Maria slipped like a shadow between them. As they found the open sea, each trawler broke into its habitual series of circles to starboard as it unloaded its gear into the water. The Helga Maria copied them, tracing the familiar pattern on the harbour master’s radar, and drifted discreetly towards the south east. Only when he was 30 miles out to sea, beyond radar range, did Captain Jack stop acting and strike out for the north.
For an hour or so, he thought that might be the end of the danger. He soon discovered he was wrong. As the Helga Maria clipped along the east coast with her sails breasting the wind, he could hear the coastguards on his radio, calling for them to return to port, squawking out alerts to other shipping to look out for them, warning that the rebel sailors were breaching a detention order. They were outlaws. They sailed on.
In the wheelhouse – with the photograph of Prince Charles shaking his hand on the wall – Captain Jack played fox with the hounds. He heard HMS Guernsey on routine patrol and slipped away from her to the east. He saw three blips on his radar. Two were trawlers, he reckoned, hanging out a net between them. The third had to be fishery protection. He showed them his stern so they couldn’t identify him. He left his radio dead. He knew they could pinpoint his position if he used it. But he needed to talk to Whitby, to Lynda at the caravan site, to find out just how many hounds were onto him. How could he do that with no radio? Captain Jack had the answer.
With God’s own fog still hanging in the air, he slipped into a little bay he knew in the Shetlands, hopped ashore and found a phone box. Lynda had news for him. According to the papers, the Department of Transport had alerted not only the coastguard and the Royal Navy, but also 14 different maritime nations, who had been asked to detain the Helga Maria on sight. Captain Jack was impressed. The problem now was that he needed provisions and, clearly, he could not just put into harbour and go shopping. He made another call, a local one, and hurried the Helga Maria back out to sea.
A few hours later, with a lot of hooting and shouting in the mist, he found the fruits of his second call, when an old Shetlands friend sailed out to meet him and transferred provisions to him over the side, while one of Jack’s crew, Edna, aged 70, scrambled over to join him to that she could visit her sister in Lerwick. As they left British waters, a Scottish fishery protection aeroplane swooped low out of the sky and dipped its wings as it buzzed along their starboard side. Was that a greeting or a warning? Captain Jack didn’t mind. He knew he was in international waters, the last refuge of the rebel. He waved farewell as the Helga Maria sped northwards again.
Now they were free and so, paradoxically, they imposed their own order. They worked in four-hour watches, alternately sailing and sleeping. They practised emergency routines. On Sunday, Rev Burkett slipped a stole over his oil skins, and took holy communion in the galley. They reached the Faroes, took on more provisions and headed out through the twin mountains, known as the Gates of the Arctic, out on to the wide open Artic sea with no prospect of land nor vessel for five days. A gale pounced on them and mauled the old schooner for 36 hours. She survived.
Now the sea was calm, the wind was easy and there was sun in the mist. Four dolphins flirted with the bow. They saw puffins and guillemots, six pilot whales peering out of the water. In the wheelhouse, the captain and the vicar spent hours talking about life and freedom and finding your own limits and one night, as they approached the top of the world, the entire sky was lit up by a multicoloured sunset and Captain Jack said “There’s no bloody words to describe this” and when he went out on deck, the Rev Burkett, left alone at the wheel with the great red sky, took the only reasonable course of action open to him. For the rest of the watch, he sang every song he could remember.
The next day, Captain Jack thought he was hallucinating. Ahead of him, the clouds seemed to be sloping upwards at 45 degrees. He took out his pipe and looked again and realised that in the crystal air, he could see, a full 70 or 80 miles ahead of him, the slopes of the snowy peaks of Jan Mayen Island. They had arrived. Island birds flapped out to investigate them. As they drew closer, they could see the black volcanic sand on the beaches and the remains of the wooden huts where Scoresby had once worked. They dropped the dinghy, drove through the swell, clambered on to the beach and, with a chill wind sweeping down from Scoresby mountain and a massive rainbow overhead, Rev Burkett led a ceremony of dedication for their plaque.
Triumphant – and a little nervous about polar bears – they pushed the dinghy back into the increasingly choppy water, only to hear the heart-stopping sound of the outboard motor choking and dying. Suddenly, they were helpless, the wind shoving them out to sea, further and further from safety with no radio and no means of rescue. “Oh, Lord,” said Rev Burkett, “please, not now.” The Lord was listening and resurrected the outboard motor, though by the time they reached the Helga Maria, the vicar was so stiff with fear and cold that he had to be hauled bodily back onboard.
For a while the return journey was idyllic, bright moonlight bouncing off the ice. They ran the boat like old hands, they caught armfuls of cod off the coast of Iceland, they felt the deep satisfaction of a mission accomplished. But when they put into the Faroes for provisions, they met a bewildered Danish sailor who explained that he had just returned from the Shetlands where his twin-masted schooner had been detained by a small army of officials on the off-chance that it was the now notorious Helga Maria. Captain Jack hoisted an Icelandic flag, dodged a Danish warship and started to plan.
Three days later, the Helga Maria slipped into a quiet bay on a small Scottish island. Captain Jack needed help. He also needed to be invisible. He crept across the hills to a call box and was alarmed to discover that it was so old-fashioned that he had to speak direct to the island operator. His Yorkshire accent would surely give him away. And what if the operator listened in to his call? He decided he would have to speak in code and then, producing his best Scottish accent, he asked the operator for the number of an old friend who lived on the island. It seemed to work. Then the operator came back. “Go ahead,” she said. “You’re through, Jack.”
Everyone on the island knew the Helga Maria was there. By the time he had finished his call, the local police constable was waiting to see him. With a long face, he informed Captain Jack that he was a wanted man. The captain pleaded that he only needed a few hours to take on provisions and he would be away. “I’m afraid that if they tell me to arrest you, I’ll have to do it,” said the policeman, He turned away. “Well, I’m off to my daughter’s,” he added. “If they call me there, I’ll be back to take you in.” Captain Jack nodded. “Mind you,” said the policeman. “She’s not on the phone.”
Captain Jack and his crew hurried to make the most of this reprieve. Two islanders were despatched to the main harbour to keep watch for officials arriving from the mainland. The rest of the islanders watched and wondered as, slowly but surely, the white-hulled, red-sailed Helga Maria vanished before their eyes. In her place, was the black-hulled, white-sailed “Argus” now flying a Spanish flag. Captain Jack was ready to go home.
It was Bank Holiday Monday, August 26, when the old schooner drifted over the horizon within sight of Whitby harbour. For the first time in 2,600 miles, Captain Jack used his radio and called Lynda, to hear what he had feared – that the hue and cry was louder than ever. He switched to the local fishermen’s channel: “If you recognise the voice or the vessel, please don’t say anything. We want to come in in our own time.”
The captain gave his last orders – hair cuts and trimmed beards all round. If they were going to be arrested, they would look smart and professional for the occasion. They swabbed the decks and polished the brass and, finally, at four in the afternoon, when all was shining and ready, with the crew standing boldly on the deck, Captain Jack sailed into Whitby harbour to a reception that beggared his imagination.
Every fishing vessel in the harbour came out to greet him, honking their foghorns and blowing their whistles. All along the harbour’s edge and up over the bridge, there were people cheering and waving. Someone was waving the Skull and Cross Bones. Someone else had a banner – “Welcome home, Jack.” It was as if all the children in the school were standing on their chairs and celebrating because the teacher had been turfed out of the classroom. It was all about freedom.
Back on land, the hugging and hand-shaking had hardly stopped, when the inspector arrived. He impounded the Helga Maria and went on to charge Captain Jack with 43 different offences under the Merchant Shipping Act, 1894. Within weeks, he had to drop all but one of them. At Teeside Crown Court last week, lawyers from the Department of Transport succeeded in extracting a £400 fine and £600 costs from the captain. Then they ordered him to buy a new fog horn. Then they ran out of rules, and the Helga Maria was free again.
Captain Jack shakes his head at the fuss. “Now, I don’t want all sorts of armchair sailors pushing off in bits of boats to do a Jack Lammiman. You can’t encourage that sort of freedom. I’m just a square, bog-standard, normal sort of sailor. I believe in law and order. But the law is not to be taken by the letter. Otherwise, we’d have plain-clothes policemen watching us dropping litter. At the end of the day, we all have to care for each other or it’s going to be a very sorry world. And I’m talking like William Scoresby would talk. I did what I did and I’m guilty of it, but I leave it other people to draw their own conclusions.”
Now he sits on the deck of the Helga Maria, with his captain’s cap and his pipe. He is £10,000 out of pocket and surrounded by letters from all kinds of people who thank him for standing up to the bureaucrats, for daring to be different, for doing what they wanted to do in pursuing his own particular great adventure.
ENDS
