On a sea of whisky

Seaspray and Whisky: Tales of a Turbulent Voyage

The voyage recounted is a crossing from Liverpool to Houston via New York and New Orleans in 1961 on the MV Allenwell, one of those shabby ships known as a tramp steamer, carrying cargo for larger, more respectable companies.

A crew of quarrelsome eccentrics and a cargo of Scotch whisky provides a tale that is by turns hilarious and tragic. When the last consignment of whisky was deposited on the dockside in Texas, a whopping 80 cases — 960 bottles — of finest Vat 69 were missing.

Norman Freeman from Omeath, Co Louth, had decided to become a radio officer to escape 1950s Ireland. In spite of having no natural aptitude for electricity or Morse code, he laboured away at the Kevin Street College of Science and Technology, eventually obtaining a second-class certificate. Three years working on passenger liners belonging to the British India Company was a life of luxury in comparison to conditions aboard the Allenwell. A crafty clerk at Marconi (his employers) took advantage of Freeman’s youth and inexperience to entice him to sign on for a three-month transatlantic trip on the Allenwell. By the time he realised what a small, run-down ship it was, it was too late to back out. Like many young Irishmen at the time, his wages were helping to support his mother and younger members of the family at home.

Freeman is an excellent story-teller, a shy, watchful young man at the time, and luckily he kept notes on that unforgettable voyage. He also has a great knack for characterisation, and a fine crew on which to use it. The chief engineer, Albert Yardley from Yorkshire, is an elderly man with emphysema who should have retired long ago. Described as “caustic and erudite”, and fond of Latin poetry, it is two years since he has seen the interior of the engine room, but he knows by instinct, from the sound, when something is going wrong.

Captain Thompson, a foul-mouthed rotund character with “sharp eyes behind rolls of flesh and canopy eyebrows”, is widely known as a boozer, but combines hard living with excellent seamanship, liking nothing better than getting his ship safely through the worst of Atlantic storms.

It is soon apparent that several of the crew members have managed to broach the cargo, and loud carousing alternates with incapacitating hangovers. The 48-hour stopover in a snowy New York does not give the crew much scope for trouble, but they more than make up for this on arrival in New Orleans. Bottles of whisky are bartered on the dockside, until the influx of cheap Vat 69 alerts the authorities.

The return voyage is equally dramatic, as the crew endures an enforced drying-out while the ship almost founders in a brilliantly evoked Atlantic storm.

Freeman’s descriptions of the highs and lows of life at sea are another of the book’s great pleasures. The camaraderie among the crew, and the weakening of sea-borne bonds once in port again, is also dramatically described. Just as on board the Allenwell, there is never a dull moment in Freeman’s inspired true-life story.