Strife on the ocean waves

Paul Carter samples maritime access 1860s style and is given a terrifying glimpse into the past and the future

I would never have made it as a sailor. I know that’s a bit of a random conclusion to draw, seemingly out of nowhere. After all, there are lots of olde worlde occupations I probably wouldn’t have been any good at. Farrier (too horsey), barber (too hairy), blacksmith (too anvilly). I’d have been rubbish at those. And they sound like a lot of effort. I might have made a good chimney sweep or a pirate, though. Anyway, I digress.

I came to this negative nautical conclusion as I stood on the deck of HMS Warrior in Portsmouth, where I was best man at a wedding. No, I didn’t know you could get married on massively armed warships either, but I quite like the symbolism.

Anyway, at risk of sounding like an unspeakably dull tour guide, the Warrior was (apparently) the first iron-hulled, armour-plated warship ever built. As you can imagine, iron-hulled, armour-plated warship designers probably weren’t expecting too many wobbly people like me to be clomping all around their decks and huge cannons (fnar). Not unless they were jolly on grog, anyhow.

I realised that this was unlikely to have been my ideal working environment roughly six seconds after climbing a ramp of Himalayan proportions purely to get on board, when I had the unenviable opportunity of tackling some naval stairs.

Now, I wasn’t aware of there being many technological advances in staircase design over the past 150 years, but I was clearly wrong, as in 1860 they seemed to have a different idea about stairs.

I like to think that I can handle most stairs reasonably well. However, I do tend to struggle a bit when the stairs in question are actually little more than a 15 foot drop accessible only by scaling what resembles an angled ladder with the rungs about three feet apart and only a rope as a handrail. A rope! Who thought that up? “I know, if I slip on this step (they were at sea remember) this haggard, mottled bit of old string will surely prevent me from plummeting to my death!” (OK, so maybe plummeting to their death is a bit of an exaggeration, but still, it probably would have caused a broken head or a graze or something.)

It was all OK in the end, though. One of these sets of stairs had at some point had a stairlift installed so the mobility incompetent like me could get downstairs, or whatever it’s called on boats. I’d never used a stairlift before, and hadn’t planned on using one for at least another 50 years, so if I gained one thing from my visit to the Warrior, it’s that I had a terrifying vision of what the future holds for me. A very slow, terrifying vision.

I can’t complain too much, though. I made it to the wedding on time, and even managed to make the thankfully short distance from my chair to the table without dropping the rings and making an utter plank of myself. It’s a good job I was wearing my sea legs that day.