Grove Koger
Another entry I’ve completed for “Sea Fever” deals with a classic of small boat fiction by Erskine Childers, who was born on June 25, 1870.
□□□
Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service. London: Smith, Elder, 1903
Born in the London suburb of Mayfair, Erskine Childers spent a number of his early years in County Wicklow, Ireland, with his mother’s uncle. Ireland would later become an obsession of his, along with a love of the solitary life and an attraction to danger. To one degree or another, both of these latter characteristics feature in his only work of fiction.
Childers served as a soldier in the Boer War of 1899-1902, a conflict he later wrote about in one volume of The Times History of the War in South Africa, but he was a keen sailor as well. He and his brother, Henry, had bought the first of a series of boats in 1893, and over time the two had grown increasingly familiar with the North Sea’s coastal waters.
Published in 1903, The Riddle of the Sands draws closely upon Childers’ eventful 1897 voyage aboard the Vixen, a former lifeboat that he had bought the same year. It recounts the efforts of two Englishmen, the experienced sailor Davies (a self-portrait) and the minor Foreign Office official Carruthers, to puzzle out German intentions in the low-lying German Frisian Islands. They carry out their efforts in Davies’ “shabby little yacht,” the Dulcibella, which Childers modeled closely on the Vixen. It seems that Davies’ suspicions have been aroused by a German yacht-owner named Dollmann, who, Davies believes, may actually be a spy and who may have tried to lure him to his death in a storm some time before.
The novel also dramatizes Childers’ concerns regarding Britain’s naval preparedness in its own waters. As Davies remarks, “We have no naval base in the North Sea, and no North Sea Fleet. Our best battleships are too deep in draught for North Sea work.”
Childers wrote what may be the single best novel of small boat sailing in Riddle of the Sands. But he also, as critic John Atkins has pointed out, “invented the spy novel as we know it today”—a genre that has grown to include works by such distinguished figures as Graham Greene and John le Carre.
Childer’s obsession with Ireland eventually took a fatal turn. Dissatisfied with the concessions made by Irish leaders in order to secure independence, he threw his support to the Irish Republican Army and was arrested for carrying a weapon during a period of martial law in 1922. As a result, he was executed by an Irish firing squad the same year.
□□□
To learn more about Childers, see Andrew Boyle, The Riddle of Erskine Childers (Hutchinson, 1977); Burke Wilkinson, The Zeal of the Convert (Luce, 1976); and Leonard Piper, Dangerous Waters: The Life and Death of Erskine Childers (Hambledon & London, 2003).
The colorful cover images you see above are taken from my 1972 Sidgwick & Jackson edition and are the work of Ken Carroll.
Davies continues his evaluation of Britain’s strategic position in its own watery back yard with the observation that “to crown all, we were asses enough to give [Germany] Heligoland, which commands her North Sea coast.” Few modern readers will recognize the reference to this tiny island, whose importance has been exactly as Davies describes. To read about its fascinating role in 19th and 20th century diplomacy and warfare, see Jan Rüger, Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea (Oxford, 2017), which mentions Childers’ novel.
John Atkins’ The British Spy Novel: Styles in Treachery was originally published by John Calder in 1984.
World Enough 