Alan Villiers - Writer and Adventurer

Writer and Adventurer

The call of the sea was strong, and soon Villiers was back at sea when the great explorer and whaler Carl Anton Larsen and his whaling factory ship, the Sir James Clark Ross came to port with five whale chasers in tow in late 1923. His accounts of the trip would eventually be published as Whaling in the Frozen South. Named for the Antarctica explorer James Clark Ross, the Ross was the largest whale factory ship in the world, weighing in at 12,000 tons. It was headed for the southern Ross Sea, the last whale stronghold left. Villiers writes: "We had caught 228, most of them blues, the biggest over 100 feet long. These yielded 17,000 barrels of oil; we had hoped for at least 40,000, with luck 60,000."

Villiers' passage on board the Herzogin Cecile in 1927 would result in his publication of Falmouth for Orders. Through it he met the de Cloux family, who later became his partners in the barque Parma. He wrote By Way of Cape Horn after his harrowing experiences on board the Grace Harwar in 1929.

The full-rigged ship Grace Harwar was beautiful as the "wind in her rigging called imperiously as she lay at the pier at Wallaroo". As Villiers stood on the dock, a wharf laborer warned "Don't ship out in her! She's a killer." The warning would prove true, as Villiers' friend Ronald Walker was lost by the time Grace Harwar made Ireland. More than 40 years old at the time, the ship had barnacles and algae growing along her waterline. "Dirty bottoms make slow ships, and slow ships make hard passages." Villiers had a desire to document the great sailing ships before it was too late, and Grace was one of the last working full-riggers. With a small ill-paid crew and no need for coal, such vessels undercut steam ships, and maybe 20 ships were still involved in the trade. The ill-fated voyage took 138 days, the Grace the last of the fleet for the year.

The voyage was filmed in both movie (6,000 feet) and still form, serving as a record of significant images of that period. Delta Productions in Glendale, California has original audio tracks and film footage from the Dwight Long collection. Long presented Last of the Great Seadogs, Square Riggers of the Past originally as an Armchair Adventures lecture series at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. He showed it as a motion picture, in Los Angeles, California, circa 1976. Delta Productions is restoring the sailing films and photos to help preserve the art of "Sailing Tall Ships".