The Last Grain Race

In 1938 Eric Newby was eighteen years old. He left a dead end job with an advertising agency in London and signed as an apprentice seaman on the four-masted sailing ship Moshulu for a trip to bring back a shipload of grain from Australia. Moshulu was one of a dozen sailing ships still engaged in the grain trade and the 1938 trip was destined to be the last of the merchant sailing era. Newby is undeservedly less well known than other writers who have imitated him. His books, "A Small Place in Italy, "On the Shores of the Mediterranean" and "The Big Red Train Ride" have been imitated by other authors. His writing style is spare and matter-of-fact; he doesn't try to impress the reader with overblown prose instead letting the facts speak for themselves without florid editorial comment.There's a funny account a trick played by the Belfast stevedores on the sailors of Moshulu. Among the tons of rocks loaded into the hold were two dead dogs. The decomposing dog carcasses fill the ship's hold with an overpowering odor that plagues the men as they dump out the ballast and load the grain months later off the shore of Adelaide.The Last Grain Race goes into great detail describing the operation of a sailing ship, complete with obscure jargon names for the sails and rigging. Newby seems to have been working too hard on the trip to completely enjoy and appreciate it. The books gives a glimpse at a lost world of merchant sailing ships and the quiet life of sailors at sea, now exchanged for sparsely manned giant container ships crossing vast oceans in a matter of days. Moshulu returns to Queenstown, Ireland on June 10, 1939 after a pace-setting 91-day passage by war of Cape Horn. It had taken 8 months for a round-trip in which Moshulu brought 4,875 tons of grain from Australia to Ireland. Newby leaves the ship a full-fledged Ordinary Seaman. World War II will start in a few months and obliterate the peaceful world of merchant sailing ships.

I was ready to drive from Seattle to San Francisco when I stopped at the library for some road music and a book on tape. This particular day, I found a jewel by one of the greats, Eric Newby's "The Last Grain Race". Eric Newby has done so much, and has been so many places that it boggles the mind. This book chronicles the beginning of his life as a true adventurer, when on the eve of WWII, he shipped out as a complete novice seaman on one of the largest sailing vessels ever built, bound for Australia and back. Though I've been reading his books for 20 years, for some reason I'd never run across "The Last Grain Race", and for well over 1000 miles I listened to the reading of this book, and when I got to Portland on my return leg, my first stop was at Powell Books to grab a hard copy of the book. This is one of the finest books I've ever read. I was going to say "seafaring books", but that is too restrictive. Eric Newby's commentary and sense of humor are first-rate, like always. While listening, and while reading, I was transported by this book. The conditions seem indescribable, but Newby succeeds in describing them, and paints cold, wet portraits of the days and nights in the rigging and the foc'sle of the barque "Moshulu". I subsequently found a book of the photographs of this voyage, Newby's "Learning The Ropes", which gives us faces to the cast of "Great Grain Race". Old friends of my youth came to visit while I was engrossed in this book, Sterling Hayden's "Voyage", the film "Windjammer", and the loss of the sailing ship "Pamir" in the late 1950's. The "Moshulu" survives today, as a restaurant ship in Philadelphia, but she was interned on Lake Union in my hometown of Seattle during WWI, and her consort, the "Monongahela" was the last tall ship to pass under the George Washington (Aurora) Bridge before it was closed to tall-masted ships. An interesting sidelight: While recently rewatching "Godfather II", I noticed that in the scene where young Vito Andolini (Corleone) arrives in New York, the ship he's on is the "Moshulu". Eric Newby is one of a kind. Now that he is gone we'll never see his like again.

This is a wonderful book. I read it many years ago, in an earlier edition. It is classical Eric Newby, full of his humor and the truth of things in one of the last clippers. It is a hard life, but very rewarding, and he captures so many facets in a book that makes excellent reading. Highly recommended.

This is a wonderful book about a young Englishman who decides to join a sailing ship (the Moshulu) on a grain race from England to Australia, not knowing that this is to be the last of the sort. In the book, he recounts his learning of the trade, the people he met, and the times he had. Extremely humorous, detailed, and interesting, this true story is appealing to any and every kind of reader. I recommend it to everyone...

Eric Newby, mired in a dead end ad agency job in 1939, signs on as an ordinary seaman on what turns out to be the last great voyage of the clipper ships. The Moshulu, a four masted barque is docked in Belfast and conditions aboard her are not much different from a hundred years earlier. Added to his difficulties is the lingua franca of the ship (Finnish), his youth and innocence (eighteen years old), and an apparent hatred of Englishmen conceived by almost everyone on board. Needless to say the resulting book is hilarious, wonderfully informative and close to being poetic in places. A word of warning. This edition contains none of the black and white photographs that were included in the original Penguin paperback. Some may be found in the same author's books, What the Traveler Saw and the recent publication, Learning the Ropes (both equally recommended)