I chose a few sentences from the first chapter of Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck (1932) for my mother’s funeral. I often read his books to her when she was old, demented and dying in a care home. When she couldn’t remember what had happened on the page or even the paragraph before, I whittled my reading down to selections from chapters I knew to be her favourites and which I loved myself. The opening of Peter Duck was one of them. Imagine an old seafarer, long retired, sitting on a bollard in Lowestoft’s inner harbour, watching the crew of a little green schooner preparing for a voyage.
And old Peter Duck looked down at her from the top of the quay and wished he was going too. ‘Going foreign she is, to blue water,’ he said to himself. And he thought of the other little schooners he had known, on the Newfoundland Banks and in the South Seas. He thought of flying fish and porpoises racing each other and turning over in the waves. He thought of the noise of the wind in the shrouds and the glow of the lamp on a moving compass card, and tall masts swaying across the stars at night. And he wished he could go to sea once more and make another voyage before it was too late.
When Ransome wrote Peter Duck, the third novel in the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ series, he was in his forties. ‘His’ character in the novel is not the elderly seaman but the energetic Uncle Jim, aka Captain Flint, taking a crew of eager children treasure-hunting in the Caribbean. Captain Flint is a generous but flawed character, frequently needing to be saved from his own mistakes either by his younger companions or, in this novel, by the old seaman Peter Duck.
Ransome had planned Peter Duck to be the imme
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Subscribe now or Sign inI chose a few sentences from the first chapter of Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck (1932) for my mother’s funeral. I often read his books to her when she was old, demented and dying in a care home. When she couldn’t remember what had happened on the page or even the paragraph before, I whittled my reading down to selections from chapters I knew to be her favourites and which I loved myself. The opening of Peter Duck was one of them. Imagine an old seafarer, long retired, sitting on a bollard in Lowestoft’s inner harbour, watching the crew of a little green schooner preparing for a voyage.
And old Peter Duck looked down at her from the top of the quay and wished he was going too. ‘Going foreign she is, to blue water,’ he said to himself. And he thought of the other little schooners he had known, on the Newfoundland Banks and in the South Seas. He thought of flying fish and porpoises racing each other and turning over in the waves. He thought of the noise of the wind in the shrouds and the glow of the lamp on a moving compass card, and tall masts swaying across the stars at night. And he wished he could go to sea once more and make another voyage before it was too late.
When Ransome wrote Peter Duck, the third novel in the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ series, he was in his forties. ‘His’ character in the novel is not the elderly seaman but the energetic Uncle Jim, aka Captain Flint, taking a crew of eager children treasure-hunting in the Caribbean. Captain Flint is a generous but flawed character, frequently needing to be saved from his own mistakes either by his younger companions or, in this novel, by the old seaman Peter Duck. Ransome had planned Peter Duck to be the immediate successor to Swallows and Amazons (1930: see SF no.18), positioning it as a story made up by the children when sheltering from the winter weather in an old wherry somewhere on the Norfolk Broads. Both books employ conventional themes of pirates, desert islands and treasure, but they are sharply different: Swallows and Amazons presents the children turning small-scale happenings into high adventure, whereas Peter Duck plunges them directly into a Robert Louis Stevenson world. Not all Ransome aficionados like it. Ransome’s publisher advised him that his second novel should be closer in location and approach to the first, building on its success. Instead of Peter Duck, Ransome produced Swallowdale (1931), which uses the same Lakeland setting of Swallows and Amazons though it keeps the children landbound. The old seaman Peter Duck is introduced as Able Seaman Titty’s ‘imaginary friend’ and there are several references to the adventure story allegedly made up by the children. The character adds little to the plot and the repeated mentions may seem rather heavy-footed. I wonder sometimes whether Ransome’s repeated signposting of the unpublished novel has a tinge of rebellion (‘That’s the book I wanted to write . . .’). When Peter Duck appears in his own story, sitting on that bollard in Lowestoft’s inner harbour, he’s instantly real. He’d been drawn from life, from an old Baltic seafarer called Carl Hermann Sehmel who had sailed in the late nineteenth-century clipper ships, racing round the Cape of Good Hope in the last great days of sail. When Ransome met Sehmel, in Latvia in the early 1920s, he was retired and taking care of pleasure boats on the Stint See, a sheltered lake off the inland River Aa (today the River Lielupe). Sehmel poured his sea-going passion into the care of Ransome’s yacht, the ketch Racundra, and volunteered to teach the inexperienced Arthur and his lover Evgenia how to handle a boat at sea. He became an integral part of Racundra’s First Cruise (Ransome’s first enduringly successful book, published in 1923). Racundra was sold when Arthur and Evgenia left Latvia for the Lake District. Her new owners, Adlard and Mamie Coles, didn’t need an extra hand when they arrived to sail her back to England. This was a mortal blow to the old man who saw his last chance of a sea voyage vanish with her. Coles reported that Sehmel begged to be allowed to accompany the yacht, even just as far as Riga, and when this was refused, he spent the last night before she left sleeping on a pile of rope on her open deck. Ransome’s fiction is kinder to Peter Duck than life was to Carl Hermann Sehmel. The passage I read to my mother is a beginning, not an end. The old seaman gets his wish. He joins the crew of the little green schooner, the Wild Cat, as they cross the Atlantic to a desert island in the Caribbean. It’s a voyage funded by Captain Flint/Uncle Jim who is grateful to his nieces (the Amazons) and their friends (the Swallows) for their success in recovering the manuscript of his travel memoir. This has been published with such success that he’s been able to buy and convert a former Baltic ketch with which he plans to take the youngsters cruising, down the English Channel perhaps. When Peter Duck joins the crew, however, he brings a boyhood story of hidden treasure, palm trees and carnivorous crabs. He’s got no map but remembers the chart co-ordinates and the details of a long-ago night when he watched something precious being buried. Unfortunately the pirate, Black Jake, knows this story too. When he sees Peter Duck step aboard the little green schooner and sail out between the Lowestoft pierheads, he will stop at nothing to steal the secret and gain the treasure for himself. Pursuit is inevitable. On board the Wild Cat Peter Duck is no imaginary friend, as he was in Swallowdale; he’s the epitome of good seamanship and crucial to safety. When they arrive at their treasure island the impetuous Captain Flint is wild to get ashore:‘And now,’ said Captain Flint at breakfast, ‘the first thing to do is to get across the island, find Mr Duck’s tree, and bring the stuff aboard.’
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said Peter Duck, ‘the first thing’s the ship. You never know how soon we may be off again if bothered with a bit of bad weather, and the first thing we ought to do is have all them water tanks filled up.’
Old age in this novel is presented as wise and reassuring. Peter Duck still has the agility to shin up Wild Cat’s mast to repair a piece of worn rigging, though he is easily overpowered by Black Jake’s brutal crew. He’s never cared about the treasure and when he faces final retirement on their return to Lowestoft, it is with equanimity. Ransome did not accept his own ageing with such good grace. Immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War he’d taken delivery of a fast and graceful yacht, the Selina King, but he had no use of her through the war years. When peace came, his health and strength had deteriorated and he was advised to sell her and build something more suitable for his old age – ‘a marine bath chair’, as he described his new boat. This was Peter Duck. She was named by the designers ‘without consulting me’, wrote Ransome grumpily. ‘She will be PD among friends.’ I have known PD since I was not quite 3, and I think her designers named her very well. Peter Duck is an energetic, three-generational novel and PD is a boat for all ages, keeping her crews safe. She was designed by Laurent Giles & Partners, an outstandingly successful mid-twentieth-century company. Ransome grumbled throughout the process, yet they gave him exactly what he had ordered: a small, stable, sea-kindly yacht, suitable for two rather large, less nimble people yet easily handled by one person sailing alone. His problem was that he didn’t want to be old. There’s a shrewd comment in Peter Duck that when Captain Flint/Uncle Jim feels too retired ‘he always tries to dash off’. PD was launched in 1946 but only remained in Ransome’s ownership until 1949 when he and Evgenia retreated to the Lake District yet again. She went through two further, brief, ownerships before my mother and father bought her in 1957. The yacht that had been designed for an elderly author and his difficult wife turned out to be ideal for a family with three young children. Her broad decks made it safe for us to run around, and unlike Wild Cat’s heavy gaff mainsail, which needed the combined strength of all six Swallows and Amazons to raise it, PD’s small sails could be hoisted by a single child – and now, by a solitary septuagenarian. Predictably I loved reading Peter Duck as a child and PD is now my joy and my responsibility. After my father died, my mother couldn’t manage all that was then necessary to keep an ageing wooden boat in good condition and she found the cabin poignantly empty with Dad dead and we children gone. She sold her. PD’s new owners, Greg and Anne Palmer, with their son Ned, sailed her round Britain and then to the Baltic, beyond Latvia (where Carl Sehmel had died in 1942) to St Petersburg, where Greg and Anne were involved in the recreation of Peter the Great’s flagship Shtandart. This was during that brief period of glasnost in the mid-1990s when British and Russian enthusiasts could co-operate on shared nautical projects. Now, it feels a world away. Greg died, PD deteriorated, and Anne sent her home to Suffolk with a crew of young Russian volunteers, pumping all the way. We hurried to welcome her. My partner Francis, fleetingly buoyed up by the hope that his biography of Karl Marx might be made into a film, agreed that we should buy her and spend the necessary money to repair the damage inflicted by icy Russian winters. There was a memorable day in the year 2000 when PD, restored and gleaming, was lifted back into her familiar Suffolk river with my mother on board as well as our youngest children. I’m sitting in her cabin as I write. It’s full of ghosts but it’s also a lively place; there’s a fresh breeze blowing outside, PD is jiggling on her mooring, the waves slapping against her hull. There are children’s voices from the shore and children’s adventurous spirits on board. Yes, I’d like a copy of Peter Duck propped on top of my coffin instead of a bunch of flowers, but please snatch it off before I vanish through the crematorium curtains. Humans grow old and die but boats and books go sailing on.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Julia Jones 2026
About the contributor
Julia Jones has been reading and sailing since childhood. She was a bookseller and a biographer but it wasn’t until after PD came back into her life that she gained the confidence to write fiction, paying homage to some of Ransome’s characters in twenty-first-century circumstances.
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