Messing About in Boats: From the Algarve to South Africa

“There is nothing – absolutely NOTHING – half so much
worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
From Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows

One of my favourite books as a young child was The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. My father had a passion for ships and all things to do with sailing and the sea. He particularly loved the quote at the beginning of this article, using it often in both formal talks and informal conversations.

We had a bed-time routine of him reading to me some story, preferably an uplifting one, before I went to sleep.

At the time we lived on a Church of Scotland mission institution in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa called Blythswood. It was relatively far from most amenities and there was no electricity supply there so when the sun went down candles and paraffin lamps provided light for meals and reading.

So some of my earliest memories are of going to bed with a hissing Coleman or Hurricane paraffin lamp beside my bed and my father reading stories to me from Arthur Ransome, A.A. Milne, Fennimore Cooper and sundry others of the “Boys’ Own Paper” sort.

From these came my fascination with small boats. Where my father was really keen on the big ships, especially of the naval variety, I was fascinated by small craft, rowing boats and dinghies and the like. I was always interested in boats that could navigate small bodies of water, rather than the wide open sea.

On a visit to the Algarve in southern Portugal some years ago I found the small boat culture there very interesting, especially the colourful “paint jobs” many of the boats had, which contrasted strongly with the rather drab paint of the boats with which I was familiar from holidays in Cape Town and other South African sea-side resorts. The boats I knew were mostly painted green or black or a combination of those two colours.

Of course the maritime culture of Portugal, and in particular of the Algarve, is of interest to anyone who studies South African history, as the first white travellers to our shores came from this area, in all likelihood. While in the Algarve the party I was with spent a good deal of time at Sagres, the small fishing village on the south-western-most point of Europe (the Promontorium Sacrum, or Sacred Promontory, from which the village derives its name), where the man well-known as “The Navigator” lived and died more than 600 years ago.