Customer Reviews

The Last Grain Race

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This is a wonderful book about a young Englishman who decides to join a sailing ship (the Moshulu) on a grain race from England to Australia, not knowing that this is to be the last of the sort. In the book, he recounts his learning of the trade, the people he met, and the times he had. Extremely humorous, detailed, and interesting, this true story is appealing to any and every kind of reader. I recommend it to everyone...

In 1938 Eric Newby was eighteen years old. He left a dead end job with an advertising agency in London and signed as an apprentice seaman on the four-masted sailing ship Moshulu for a trip to bring back a shipload of grain from Australia. Moshulu was one of a dozen sailing ships still engaged in the grain trade and the 1938 trip was destined to be the last of the merchant sailing era.

Newby is undeservedly less well known than other writers who have imitated him. His books, "A Small Place in Italy, "On the Shores of the Mediterranean" and "The Big Red Train Ride" have been imitated by other authors. His writing style is spare and matter-of-fact; he doesn't try to impress the reader with overblown prose instead letting the facts speak for themselves without florid editorial comment.

There's a funny account a trick played by the Belfast stevedores on the sailors of Moshulu. Among the tons of rocks loaded into the hold were two dead dogs. The decomposing dog carcasses fill the ship's hold with an overpowering odor that plagues the men as they dump out the ballast and load the grain months later off the shore of Adelaide.

The Last Grain Race goes into great detail describing the operation of a sailing ship, complete with obscure jargon names for the sails and rigging. Newby seems to have been working too hard on the trip to completely enjoy and appreciate it. The books gives a glimpse at a lost world of merchant sailing ships and the quiet life of sailors at sea, now exchanged for sparsely manned giant container ships crossing vast oceans in a matter of days.

Moshulu returns to Queenstown, Ireland on June 10, 1939 after a pace-setting 91-day passage by war of Cape Horn. It had taken 8 months for a round-trip in which Moshulu brought 4,875 tons of grain from Australia to Ireland. Newby leaves the ship a full-fledged Ordinary Seaman. World War II will start in a few months and obliterate the peaceful world of merchant sailing ships.

Unfortunately the unappealingly named "The Last Great Grain Race" might be left on the bookshelf if it were not for its companion volume of photographs more appropriately titled "Learning The Ropes; An Apprentice on the Last of the Windjammers," both by Eric Newby. Oddly these volumes were issued over forty years apart, Grain Race in 1956 and Ropes in 1999. (A recent volume of Grain Race was reissued in 1999, possibly to take advantage of the pictorial release.)

After a brief stint as an office clerk, Newby at eighteen signed on as an apprentice seaman for an around the world cargo voyage, with no nautical experience or skills other than a careful eye and superb memory for detail. "The Last Great Grain Race" is the story of one of the last four-masted barques, which in 1938 sailed from Ireland to Australia to pick up a cargo of grain and return to Ireland, a voyage which would take nine months. Ultimately it was to become the last voyage in such a vessel, as the impending war would change the world forever. We are fortunate that Newby was along to document the voyage. We are equally appreciative of his thoughtfulness in bringing his camera, as "Learning the Ropes" is the superb photo essay of this journey.

Newby apparently was a very skilled photographer. Oddly, he only briefly mentions his possession of a camera in "The Last Great Grain Race." He never lets on that his is so actively chronicling events and shipmates throughout the voyage. Though Newby does an excellent job describing what is like to climb aloft in all kinds of weather, the black and white photographs take the reader aloft as well and provide the narrative even with more impact and grace.

The crew is as varied and colorful as one might expect the conditions are harsh and oftentimes dangerous; the work is unrelenting, demanding and dangerous in its own right. Newby works alongside seasoned veterans and never shirks.

Grain Race however does have its limitations. There is a tremendous amount of technical detail that can often leave the reader literally at sea. For example "There were still the sheets of the topmast staysails to be shifted over the stays and sheeted home, the main and mizzen courses to be reset, and the yards trimmed to the Mate's satisfaction with the brace whips." Newby does provide a graphic of the sail plan and running rigging (79 reference points), but these are only of marginal assistance.

Another shortcoming is the language barrier Newby faces. This is a Finnish crew and commands are rarely given in English. Newby and the reader often have to work out the language; if the reader misses the first context or explanation then subsequent uses of the terminology will be lost, a glossary might have helped here. Newby does faithfully record dialects especially when he is being spoken to in occasionally recognizable English and these dialogues are often amusingly recounted.

Eric Newby should seriously consider issuing both in a single volume and one has to wonder why this wasn't done when Grain Race was first issued or at least when "Learning the Ropes" was released a couple of years ago. It is interesting to speculate on the length of time between the original release of Grain Race and the very vivid and informative photographs. Regardless it was worth the wait.

Grain Race the narrative and Grain Race the photographs make for an enjoyable double read.

I was ready to drive from Seattle to San Francisco when I stopped at the library for some road music and a book on tape. This particular day, I found a jewel by one of the greats, Eric Newby's "The Last Grain Race". Eric Newby has done so much, and has been so many places that it boggles the mind. This book chronicles the beginning of his life as a true adventurer, when on the eve of WWII, he shipped out as a complete novice seaman on one of the largest sailing vessels ever built, bound for Australia and back.
Though I've been reading his books for 20 years, for some reason I'd never run across "The Last Grain Race", and for well over 1000 miles I listened to the reading of this book, and when I got to Portland on my return leg, my first stop was at Powell Books to grab a hard copy of the book.
This is one of the finest books I've ever read. I was going to say "seafaring books", but that is too restrictive.
Eric Newby's commentary and sense of humor are first-rate, like always. While listening, and while reading, I was transported by this book. The conditions seem indescribable, but Newby succeeds in describing them, and paints cold, wet portraits of the days and nights in the rigging and the foc'sle of the barque "Moshulu". I subsequently found a book of the photographs of this voyage, Newby's "Learning The Ropes", which gives us faces to the cast of "Great Grain Race".
Old friends of my youth came to visit while I was engrossed in this book, Sterling Hayden's "Voyage", the film "Windjammer", and the loss of the sailing ship "Pamir" in the late 1950's. The "Moshulu" survives today, as a restaurant ship in Philadelphia, but she was interned on Lake Union in my hometown of Seattle during WWI, and her consort, the "Monongahela" was the last tall ship to pass under the George Washington (Aurora) Bridge before it was closed to tall-masted ships.
An interesting sidelight: While recently rewatching "Godfather II", I noticed that in the scene where young Vito Andolini (Corleone) arrives in New York, the ship he's on is the "Moshulu".
Eric Newby is one of a kind. Now that he is gone we'll never see his like again.

This is a wonderful book. I read it many years ago, in an earlier edition. It is classical Eric Newby, full of his humor and the truth of things in one of the last clippers. It is a hard life, but very rewarding, and he captures so many facets in a book that makes excellent reading. Highly recommended.

Eric Newby, who died in 2006 at the age of 86, was an adventurer and gifted travel writer who chronicled his experiences in several books that reflect his curiosity and research about the world as well as his shrewd and often very hilarious observations of humans making their way in it. Originally published in 1956, THE LAST GRAIN RACE could be called memoir, but Newby recreates his apprenticeship aboard one of the last mercantile sailboats on the eve of World War II via his diaries, claptrap memory and research, creating an airtight world with immediacy. There is no sense of retrospect, distance of time or hindsight in the narrative.

Newby was 18 when he went to sea in 1938 on a barque owned by a Scandinavian shipping firm. Before World War II, it was still economical to deploy a commercial fleet of these behemoths around the world to scoop up grain crops from Australia for the European market. When his job at an advertising agency (hilarious) was threatened by lay-offs, he indulged the youthful romance of life at sea stoked by a girlfriend's naval father and signed up with the Erikson firm's ship, Moshulu. He kitted up grandly, found a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. Immediately aboard ship, he learned that a lot of the work centered about scaling those tall masts, cleaning the "restrooms" and repelling off the side to scrape rust. He was the only Englishman among Scandinavians and Germans who were decidedly not of the Louis Vuitton school. Newby's character sketches are priceless and he captures the hybrid vernacular so well that by the end of the book, the reader knows as much as he learned. The book is loaded with technical information about the boat and its mission, but also with accounts of dramatic storms, bedbug plagues or occasional leisurely pursuits like capturing an albatross just to measure its wingspan. I purchased a used original UK Reader's Union edition (think Book of the Month Club) that usefully had a detailed illustration inside the back cover and a world map inside the front, with the journey dated and marked off.

Infrequently, news of the outside world drifted to the ship via a radio signal from a distant land. It is not good news, but at sea they can mostly ignore it. Like the Pequod in MOBY DICK, the Moshulu was its own complete world. That's the beauty of this book: it captures a fully evolved culture that would suddenly disappear a year later. When Moshulu unexpectedly returned first among the fleet, Newby packed it in. He had lived a lifetime and grown up in under a year. The next time the boat went out, it returned to the waiting Germans. Afterwards, it turned up in a future where commercial sailing ships were no longer competitive. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Eric Newby, mired in a dead end ad agency job in 1939, signs on as an ordinary seaman on what turns out to be the last great voyage of the clipper ships. The Moshulu, a four masted barque is docked in Belfast and conditions aboard her are not much different from a hundred years earlier. Added to his difficulties is the lingua franca of the ship (Finnish), his youth and innocence (eighteen years old), and an apparent hatred of Englishmen conceived by almost everyone on board. Needless to say the resulting book is hilarious, wonderfully informative and close to being poetic in places. A word of warning. This edition contains none of the black and white photographs that were included in the original Penguin paperback. Some may be found in the same author's books, What the Traveler Saw and the recent publication, Learning the Ropes (both equally recommended)

If you live in Philadelphia and have eaten or seen the Moshulu in the harbor, you must read this book. If not, still read it. Eric Newby's approach to "travel writing" is great. I have read most of his books. The race brings back a more innocent time before WWII when thrills and discovery were available.

Another one of this author's books that did not last nearly long enough - why oh why was Eric not as wordy as say Norman Sherry, or Simon Schama!

Having gone to sea just before my sixteenth birthday, and arrived for the first time in America nine weeks later, I can attest the truth of this account, not the sailing though as by then those beauties of the seas were rarely seen at all. Eric is a strapping eighteen and ... perhaps fearing that his first ship, on a world circumnavigation, in a four masted barque would not be challenging enough ... he joins a Finnish ship with no knowledge of any of the languages the orders were issued in by his Swedish, Finnish and other polyglot officers. He joins with a wildly inappropriate and insecure Louis Vuitton "folio" sea-chest, is sent immediately up the main-mast to the very truck and trades nicknames as he acquires skills and acceptance, from "Kossuri" an aristocratic derision to match his trunk, to a respectful Strongbody" after the usual first-trip fight, that he won.

The trip turns out to be (1938) the last of the `grain races' from Australia back to Europe and Moshulu sails magnificently enough to actually win - through storms of force 8 and 9 to near hurricanes. He is thrown onto the deck when "she ships them green" and nearly, more fatally, falls from the top mast when furling.

On his first working day he drops a hammer over the side and his pay is docked. I was once washed off the flying bridge and onto the well-deck in a gale, surfacing from the tons of green, cold water to find myself in the scuppers hanging on with everything - teeth included. My pay was subsequently docked too - I had let go the coffee pot I was carrying, and it joined Eric's hammer.

Yet the author is wistful in his goodbyes to seamanship, "I look back to my time in her with great pleasure", perhaps feeling, like me and Conrad, who wrote in Youth - "Wasn't that he best time when we were young at sea?"

This is one of the best travel/adventure books I have ever read. I must have read it 10 times as a young boy. My copy is long lost somewhere, in some dusty carton in some corner of the world. I am just about to order one from Amazon. Am delighted I found it.

Last year I was in Gothenburg, Sweden, and saw a four masted barque in the harbour - apparently a tourist attraction. I was sure it was one of the barques that took part in this Last Grain Race. Subsequently I found she had indeed taken part in the grain runs (though I have to re-read the book to figure out if she was in that particular Last Grain Race. Her name is "Viking" and you can look her up on Google).

Inspired, I hunted around on Google and found Moshulu; she is moored in Philadelphia and has been converted into a seemingly upmarket restaurant!

I cannot recommend this hugely entertaining book too highly for anyone interested in adventure. Newby tells the tale of a lifestyle long lost to modernity, and a ship full of utter characters, with great humour.