In the early spring of 1893, a seemingly unassuming young man, a clerk who then worked in the British House of Commons, made a fateful decision—he would learn to sail. His name was Erskine Childers. He had a slight build, poor eyesight, a weak chin, and was partly disabled, walking always with a limp to favor his left foot, the result of a hiking injury years earlier. Though he would ultimately lead an eventful and varied life, it was two sailing adventures in particular that made him famous and notorious.
Starting out as a sailor, Erskine literally had no idea what he was doing. Though they had no interest in competitive sailing, he and his equally clueless brother, Henry, purchased as their first boat a large racing yacht, Shulah, with a deep keel and enormous sailplan. They also hired two men to teach them how to manage her. Mocked and humiliated by their professional crew, the brothers soon decided they needed no tutors, fired the crew, and managed to complete a summer’s tour of Ireland and Scotland on their own.
“Memorable was the first morning,” Erskine later wrote, “when we set the sails, weighed the anchor, and glided down the loch, uncriticised, unaided, masters of our fate.”
Realizing how inappropriate Shulah was for cruising, Erskine soon replaced her with a far smaller, equally inappropriate vessel. Marguerite, known affectionately as Mad Agnes, was just 18 feet long, half-decked with no cabin, and drew less than 3 feet with her centerboard up. Erskine fashioned a cockpit tent for shelter and set out on a rather masochistic adventure. Sailing solo and sometimes with crew, he ranged far and wide along the southeast coast of England and twice crossed the English Channel to France. He often anchored out in open, unprotected roadsteads, for as he explained: “I have the strongest antipathy to the dirt, odours, publicity and general discomfort of a quayside berth in a crowded basin.”
At the end of that season, 1895, Erskine was awarded the Admiral de Horsey Silver Cup for best cruise of the year by the Royal Cruising Club, which he had only just joined.
Two years later, in early August 1897, Erskine traded for a third boat, , a much more appropriate 30-foot cutter with a centerboard, a proper cabin, and three comfortable berths. “No one could call [her] beautiful,” he later wrote. “We grew to love her in the end, but never to admire her.”
