Mackinnon - The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

Praise for Jack de Crow

a great travel writer and more importantly a great traveller
The Sydney Morning Herald

not just an adventurer, but an artist, philosopher and keen observer of the world around him
The Canberra Times

a captivatingly odd tale
Good Reading

a clever and entirely engaging read
The Melbourne Times

a wonderful idea for a book a series of even bolder improvisations undertaken in praise of the spirit of adventure
The Times Literary Supplement

The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

The Unlikely
Voyage of
JACK de
CROW

A.J. Mackinno

Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd
Level 5, 289 Flinders
Lane Melbourne Victoria 3000 Australia
email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com
http://www.blackincbooks.com

A.J. Mackinnon 2009

This is a revised edition of The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow by A.J. Mackinnon, first published by Seafarer Books, 102 Redwald Road, Rendlesham, Woodbridge, Suff olk IP12 2TE, UK.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Mackinnon, A. J. (Alexander James), 1963

The unlikely voyage of Jack de Crow / A.J. Mackinnon

ISBN: 9781863954259 (pbk.)

Mackinnon, A. J. (Alexander James), 1963
Jack de Crow (Dinghy)
Sailing--English Channel.
Sailing--Europe.
Sailing--Black Sea.
Voyages and travels.

Illustrations and maps by A.J. Mackinnon
Book design by Thomas Deverall
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

Contents

Part One
Bumping into Places

For there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tigers heart wrapped in a players hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.

ROBERT GREENE, A Groats Worth of Wit

This is an account of a journey made from North Shropshire in England to Sulina on the Black Sea, sailing and rowing over three thousand miles in a small Mirror dinghy. It was in many ways an accident that it happened at all. I had intended to spend a quiet two weeks travelling the sixty miles or so down to Gloucester on the River Severn. Somehow things got out of hand a year later I had reached Romania and was still going.

I have many heroes. They are mostly drawn from the world of childrens literature, I confess. But the earliest hero I can remember is Doctor Dolittle, that plump and kindly figure who lived in Pud-dleby-on-the-Marsh and talked to the animals. It was not this last attribute that first entranced me, however. It was the illuminated capital letters at each chapter heading which made a high-pooped, billow-sailed little galleon of each capital S, or turned an A into a frame of leaning palm trees, and, above all, it was the marvellously casual line:

Doctor Dolittle sailed away in a ship with his monkey and his parrot, his pig and his duck , and bumped into Africa.

Bumped into Africa! Here was the way to travel! No timetables, no travel agents, no dreary termini clanging with loudspeaker announcements. No grubby platforms, no passports, no promises of postcards to be sent on safe arrival, just the little ship slipping down the river to the sea. Indeed the chief attributes of all the good Doctors voyages seemed to be simple enough: a cheerful optimism and a beloved hat, both of which I happened to have. There was clearly nothing stopping me doing the same.

I had been working for six years as a teacher in a place called Ellesmere College. This is a minor public school set amid the meres and meadows of Shropshire a flat Shire land of grazing cattle and placid canals where narrowboats glide serenely across the countryside. In the distance rise the first blue hills of Wales, an altogether wilder and more enchanted land.

Some of that dark Welsh magic must have leaked from those nearby valleys, seeping across the prosperous plain to lap about the confines of Ellesmere College. For in my first year there something happened which has a bearing on all this present tale.

Amid the busy routine of a new term in a new place, there grew in my mind a faint but persistent daydream, a niggling ambition of the most childish and unlikely sort: namely, to own a tame crow. To this day I am not quite sure where such a fancy came from. Perhaps it was the weight of my academic gown on my shoulders, heavy as Prosperos cloak, that prompted me to seek out an Ariel of my own.

One does not, of course, share such daydreams readily with others. They have a habit of wilting on contact with outside scrutiny. But when my oldest friend rang to see how I was settling in to my new life at Ellesmere, I did confide to him, half jokingly, self-mockingly, my avian fancy. Well, Rupert has long ago become accustomed to this sort of thing from me, so after expressing a polite but distant acknowledgement of my latest daydream, he neatly turned the conversation to more immediate issues such as the quality of school food, coming holiday dates and whether Id purchased a car yet.

But perhaps such fancies are not so much wishes as faint psychic previsions of what will be. For the next day, the very next day, I received a brief note in my pigeon-hole via the College receptionist: Crow arrives Friday next. Prepare.

Rupert had, within hours of putting down the phone, stumbled across a tame, slightly injured jackdaw that needed an owner.

The bird arrived in a cat basket in the middle of the House Singing Competition and, from the moment he arrived, divided the entire College into two camps those who adored him, and those who loathed him to the least of his sooty black feathers. The first camp consisted of the Headmasters family, the laundry ladies and me; the second camp was everyone else, who regarded him more as a Caliban than an Ariel.

I called him Jack de Crow as a pun on the Headmasters surname, du Croz though his full name was actually Jack Micawber

The Master Summons His Familiar

Phalacrocorax Magister Mordicorvus de Crow, a wild and marvellous name spun out of some dark, dog-Latin, cobwebby corner of my brain and which defies rational explanation. The Headmaster was, I think, suitably flattered. He did not, after all, dismiss me when his school was systematically plundered by the new arrival.

For Jack de Crow found a wide field of play for his talents at Ellesmere. In the first week he burgled the Bursars bedroom and stole Mrs Bursars ruby earring, demolished an important set of exam papers in the office of the Director of Studies, and brought to a halt an important hockey match by sitting on the hockey ball and unpicking all the stitches before he could be shooed away. Week Two ended with the loss of a gold pen and a bunch of keys from my Housemasters desk, and the steady increase among the students of Crow-ate-my-homeworkstyle excuses. And this was when he was still in less than peak condition.