The life and death of the Duchess

This book describes the story of the last two years of Herzogin Cecilie, one of the last and finest four-masted, steel-hulled, commercial sailing ships. In her first book, ‘Out of the World’, Pamela Bourne described how she acquired the nickname ‘Nils Jacob’ en route from Europe to Australia on a modern cargo vessel, then travelled extensively in the southern Pacific, and finally became a working passenger on this great sailing ship. They left South Australia with a cargo of wheat in April, 1934, and arrived in Belfast four months later. Her earlier adventure is recounted as a flashback in Part Two of this book, but Part One starts on September 28th, 1935, with her marrying the Captain of the ship, Sven Eriksson, in Finland, at his Pellas home in the Åland Islands, where the ship was registered. Part Three describes how, within a few days, they set sail for South Australia, where they again loaded wheat for Europe. On April 23rd, 1935, they reached Falmouth, and received or orders to discharge at Ipswich. Part Four recounts how Sven set out almost immediately, and, during the early morning darkness of the 25th, tragically drove the vessel onto rocks near Bolt Head on the Devon Coast. Over the next three months, desperate efforts were made to refloat and save the ship, but she was eventually abandoned in nearby Starehole Cove where she had been beached. Part Five is again set in Sven’s home area and tells of the birth of the first child “a boy with three parents” whom they named Sven-Cecilie. Pamela Bourne’s relationship with the ship was truly passionate, and, being well-read, she introduced her book with a passage from ‘The Shadow-Line’ by Joseph Conrad which eloquently described such passion. She was also madly in love with Sven, and the loss of both the ship and his career were two unbelievably harsh burdens for her. Indeed, it was not until after Sven’s death in 1954, that she wrote this book, inspired by Eric Newby’s account of his similar voyage around the world in 1938-1939 aboard another four-masted barque called Moshulu (published in 1956 as ‘The Last Grain Race’). Poetically, he had embarked on his adventure after swimming around the wreck of the Herzogin Cecilie. Pamela Bourne was deeply and emotionally committed to both the ship and to her husband (and he had a similar relationship with his dog Paik!). The rescue attempt, for example, seemed to have been directed predominantly by her and in the Appendix she stoutly defended Sven against later criticism. Readers will find a more reflective and balanced assessment of the story in the book ‘Herzogin Cecilie’ by Greenhill and Hackman, which was published in 1991.