Customer Reviews

The Grey Seas Under: The Perilous Rescue Mission of a N.A. Salvage Tug

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The ocean-going salvage tug, Foundation Franklin was more than a match for the worst the North Atlantic could throw at her, including Force 10 gales and Nazi U-Boats. Perfect Storm, eat your heart out! Here is the real book about the great-hearted men and their staunch little ships that survived blow after blow from the Atlantic and bobbed up for more.

If the author, Farley Mowat is sometimes guilty of over-the-top prose---well, he lived and worked on the Franklin, and he loved her sturdy lines, her jaunty roll, and every rivet that held her together while she rescued ships that were Goliaths to her chubby, little Baby Huey. No work could have been more dangerous; none required a higher degree of seamanship and courage than dropping a line on a berserk, lunging, steel-hulled freighter, and then towing her through the maw of a mid-December gale, or the shoals and sunkers of the Newfoundland coast---something the Franklin did so many times that her crew lost memory of all but their most freakish or man-killing expeditions.

Grey Seas Under will give you an interesting perspective on the true maritime heroes of World War II. Farley Mowat doesnt pull any punches when he describes the tension that existed between the expert seamen on the ocean-going salvage and rescue tugs, and their relatively amateur counterparts on Canadian and American naval warships. Some of the funniest scenes in the book involve convoys of merchant ships under the protection of corvettes and destroyers. Once a U-Boat had been sighted and the merchants steamed for cover, it was up to the Franklin to rescue the ones that ran into each other or shoaled themselves. Usually, the tug had to perform her duties without any cover from the warships.

The days the salvors (tugboat seamen) spent tethered to fat and crippled merchantmen, crawling along on a straight course at a speed of two or three knots like mechanical targets in a shooting gallery, were the kind of days that would drain the courage from the most heroic man aliveThe Germans knew, that for every rescue vessel sunk there would be a score of crippled merchantmen who would never make safe port.

This is a great book about men against the sea, even though the language gets very nautical at times. Read it and you will learn all about Lloyds Open Form, and the tricks that wrecked merchant masters play to cheat tugs out of their salvage fees. Youll learn to tell the difference between Monkey Island and the poop deck---and the difference between brass monkeys and true seamen. Youll thrill to the dangers of sunkers, beam seas, and Arctic white-outs. Youll bite through your pipe-stem, just like the Franklins captain did during those tows when his sturdy little tug steamed back into port with barely enough coal in her bunkers to cook a pot of beans.

Someone ought to make a movie out of Grey Seas Under. Its got everything---romance (between man and ship, at least); life-and-death adventures; heroism; humor; and the treacherous ice, wind, and sea of what the author respectfully refers to as the Great Western Ocean.

I've just finished this work and give it five stars because it is a tale well told, with skill and fire. The book first provides a sound and interesting introduction to salvage law and operations -- I had thought the title alluded to lifesaving missions as the primary mission of the salvage tug. Instead, saving sailors was strictly secondary to saving cargo and vessels, although the little tug actually saved more lives than government vessels whose primary mission was lifesaving. Mr Mowat then describes how a small rescue tug and its crew made dozens of successful and intensely difficult rescues of vessels in distress. These rescues were carried out using determination and cunning, and a synergy between a well-designed boat and its crew, rather than computers and satellite navigation, and they demanded an intense courage and fortitude which may seem unimaginable in our softer and more pleasant technological age. We are the richer for Mr Mowat's story, because it gives us an insight into another era, before technology had improved our abilities but lessened our involvement and committment. My only real problem with the book was that Mr Mowat never discussed the important role played by those who maintained this vessel, even though he describes how a lack of maintenance and care almost destroyed the vessel as it passed into obsolescence during its final voyage.

If you enjoy the Jack Aubrey novels as much as I do, you'll doubless be taken by this more modern sea story.

Mowat is a contemporary writer of fiction and non-fiction about Canada and the north, covering natural science, Eskimos, archeology and autobiography.

He also writes authoritatively about the sea. This book has salt on every page. It is the story of the conversion of a rusty British WWI seagoing tug into the "Foundation Franklin," a seagoing salvage vessel, working out of Newfoundland or Nova Scotia. There was a real Franklin salvage company on which this very realistic novel is based.

Those who have sailed on weather patrol or to Greenland, or to other stormy seas, will relish the salt spray and dangerous hawser-passing and towing. You will experience the bitter along with the triumphs as the crew is frustrated by losing the tow or arriving too late at the job, thus throwing the expense of the attempt into the foam.

A splendid book!

Incidentally, one of Mowat's autobiographical books, "The Dog Who Wouldn't Be," is about the funniest book I have ever read. ISBN 0-553-27928-9.

As a sea officer, I learned about salvage tugs,the men who man them and the ships they've saved from stories told around the dinner table in the officers' saloon and in bars around the world. You just pray you and your ship will never have need of their services.

There are many deep-ocean tugs whose names are well known in the maritime community, but Foundation Franklin was the queen of her kind. In ten words or less, if you were in trouble and she got a line on you, chances were you'd make it home. From a seafarer, there is no higher praise.

Farley Mowat tells her story, from her owners acquiring her as Royal Navy surplus in 1919 until she was laid up for the last time, with loving attention to detail. He writes of her missions, from the comparatively mundane to the incredibly dangerous, in such a way that you feel the deck moving under your feet and the cold North Atlantic spray lashing your face. He puts you squarely in the middle of the action. True, the finer points will be best appreciated by those of us who make or have made our living on the deep blue, but the writing is so rich even landsmen and armchair sailors will understand and come to respect the intrepidity of the deep ocean salvage men. That's reason enough to read this book.

But more to the point, Mowat manages to convey to his readers the pride that sailors feel when some of their own pull off a difficult mission. He chronicles a little known and unappreciated chapter of the Second World War: the Merchant Mariners who faced the perils of U-Boats, bomber attacks and of course the ordinary hazards of foul weather sailing; and who, by getting the cargo through, enabled the armed forces to win the war against the Nazis. After reading the book, you will understand why we feel reassured by the knowledge that Foundation Franklin's bell still hangs in the offices of her salvage company - and that when they ring the bell to tell her successors that there is a ship out there in trouble and to get a move on, there are still brave men to answer her call.

The repitition of storms and salvage can be boring unless you have experienced the storm at sea or been savaged by weather. A warm and dry reader might not ever appreciate what the FOUNDATION FRANKLIN and her crew went through. The North Atlantic in winter is a death trap for any weakness in a vessel and this book pays tribute to those who time and time again risked their lives in salvage and rescue. A must read for anyone who knows the sea.

This book is the best non-fiction book on one salvage company's tugs and men and the many jobs they took on to try and save ships in distress. They are heading out to sea at great peril to thier own lives to try and save a ship and it's crew. The book is riveting, a real page turner. If you like sea stories you cannot put this book down until the end. Farley Mowat has a gift for writing this book that makes you feel like you are on board the salvage tugs going thru these desperate hours with the crew. I love ships and sea stories and this is my absolute favorite.

Perhaps some of the tales are embellished by a seaman's blurred memory of hair's-breadth escapes from watery tombs. Nonetheless, one can't help but be awestruck by the stoic inexhaustible courage and stamina of the "Newfie" sailors, who merit their reputation as the world's finest seamen even if the truth may be varnished a bit. Mowat's understated yet always interesting style gives no cause for skepticism. The economics and frustrating legalisms of salvage are conveyed with no less clarity than the heroics. But these men are not heroes in any sense that we might readily understand. At least a Shackleton or a Tensing performs their valorous deeds with some hope of glory. The indefatigable crewmen got meager financial reward, even during the few instances where the salvage claims were paid in full and the ledgers stood in the black. Their wartime work was considerably more dangerous than the duly celebrated Canadian, British and American merchantmen and navy...the miniscule salvage tug Foundation Franklin was more often than not denied the customary warship escort when operating in U-Boat infested waters, when panicked radiomen on board the doomed vessels broke radio silence and practically served as beacons to draw the German wolfpacks to would-be rescuer and rescued alike. The several skippers of the Franklin demonstrated great ingenuity under duress when faced with what would seem to be certain failure in snow-blown gales, blindly groping their way among reef-studded shallows to persevere with what might seem insane stubbornness, even recklessness. Mowat knows and loves ships, their men and he respects the awesome destructive power of storm driven water. Delightful and informative reading.

Farley Mowat has the ability to tell in his sing-song Canuck cadence the most fascinating tales... the color and depth of the characters, the times and thier circumstance. This story is my favorite. You can practically smell the fumes of the fuel-oil reacting to the boiler plate. The close air inside a ship as water sloshes back and forth as she violently rolls while her men preform a heroic feat... not just staying afloat, but rescuing other vessels in this mahem. Yup, she's a pageturner.

This is my favourite Mowatt! It's a shame more people don't know of this one. If you liked "The Perfect Storm" at all, then this story is for you. The life of a tug on the East coast of Canada, told by one of Canada's best story tellers. You can hear the wind, feel the weather and can only admire the ship and people who do the impossible with such regularity. There's the injustice of the 'owners' and the frailty of the 'casualties' and a good deal of humour to balance everthing out. A true story (mostly), it cronicles a time on the East coast and in Canada when the old world had to give way to the new and what we lost in moving forward. Wonderful.

This is an interesting book about the life of a salvage tug on the stormy North Atlantic. It is told from a sailor's point of view which makes for good story telling but may not be as factually acurate as possible. Mowat admits as much.

This is a book that you can stop reading after completing the first half. There are only so many variations on the story of a ship in trouble, bad weather sets in, and the more-than-sea worthy tug heroically comes to the rescue. The book initially holds your attention but becomes highly repetitive by the later chapters.

One thing I did very much appreciate about the book was Mowat's unvarnished explanations of how salvage companies earn their money. It's not an entirely glamorous business and Mowat does a good job of pointing out how one's pecuniary interests leads to decision making. Obviously, salvage tugs don't operate out of the goodness of their heart.