Barques, Sparks & Sharks: an Orcadian at Sea

Barques, Sparks & Sharks ＂A lost world of seafaring adventure is brought back to life.＂

＂The winds are mad, they know not whence they come, nor whither they would go,＂ wrote the 17th-century scholar Robert Burton, ＂and those men are maddest of all that go to sea.＂ But Robert Burton lived in the closed world of Oxford which he never managed to leave, and Len Wilson grew up in the town of Stromness, at the northern entrance of Scapa Flow where the great ships lay in wartime, and which for more than two centuries was the Atlantic port for Hudson’s Bay Company ships taking men and supplies to Canada; and there was a long seagoing tradition in his family and indeed in the small island of Graemsay where they came from. At the age of six months he was being taken across there on his grandfather’s yole, and by the time he was three he was standing at the tiller of his father’s boat.

He got some good advice from his uncle Charlie, a master mariner himself. ＂If you must go to sea, then go as a radio officer. That way you’ll easily get a shore job when you’re ready for it.＂

And there is another fine tradition in Len’s family, a keen eye for the world about them and a great ability to tell a story. They are often craftsmen, a valued skill on a small island, and Len himself in recent years has taken up his father’s interest in making ships in bottles. Len is a natural storyteller, crafting together a tale as well as he can build a boat (another part of his work experience over the years), with warmth and humour and a sheer delight in the people and places that he encounters along the way.

Dodging the KGB in Murmansk, the vigilantes of Lake Maracaibo, and downing bowls of kava in Fiji, Len Wilson recounts his globe-trotting adventures as a Morse-coding ’sparks’, serving on the swankiest passenger liner to the rustiest tramp steamer. Like his Viking forebears, Len clocks up a stomach-churning quarter of a million miles as a radio officer, criss-crossing the equator at least ten times by the age of twenty-two. He recounts eight epic voyages before the dawn of container ships and long distance air travel - a lost world of seafaring adventureis brought back to life. We span the globe from the Clyde to Khorramshahr, dropping in on Caracas, Karachi and Calabaras we trace a life Len and his ancestors have pursued down the centuries, helping to connect and create our kaleidoscopic world.

Len Wilson’s maritime memoir, Barques, Sparks & Sharks, includes over 100 personal photos and images, beautifully enhancing these swashbuckling tales from bygone days of maritime life.