E F Knight’s Pioneering Voyages: Trail-Blazing Bluewater Cruising

Bluewater cruising is taken for granted these days – yet one pioneering adventure put it on the map. Sam Jefferson relates E F Knight’s South Atlantic Soujourn.

Prior to 1920, yacht cruising was an occupation indulged in by precious few. If you wanted to go sailing, you raced off Cowes with a professional crew and captain. The concept of slumming it in some scrubby little yacht with no servants was deemed as simply beyond the pale and the idea of crossing oceans in a small yacht was considered wildly eccentric. Yet two trail blazing voyages to an obscure south Atlantic island by Victorian yachtsman Edward Frederick Knight changed all that. In many ways his trips threw the doors wide open when it came to bluewater yacht cruising, opening up new horizons and expectations for yachtsmen. 

E F Knight was a fascinating character; on the one hand an establishment man, on the other a wild rover and a free thinker. His sailing career had commenced with pottering about in open boats off Honfleur in the 1860s and blossomed to encompass two trips to the Baltic, and two epic transatlantic voyages, both taking in the mysterious island of Trinidade. This is the yarn we focus on here. 

Knight’s first cruise to Trinidade was undertaken aboard the Falcon a converted Penzance lugger 42ft in length and yawl rigged. This sturdy vessel transported Knight and a makeshift crew of two briefless barristers and an ex officer in the Merchant Navy all the way to Buenos Aires. The cruise didn’t stop there either, for Knight then took his redoubtable vessel miles inland, first heading 2,365 miles up the Rio Parana until they were almost in Chile. Not content with that, they sailed up the River Paraguay to Paraguay where, at one point, the Falcon became totally embayed in a huge island of floating water lilies and, shortly afterward, his entire crew, utterly captivated by this land of ‘lotus eaters’ – as Knight termed them – jumped ship. 

All of this was remarkable and completely uncharted territory for cruising yachtsmen in 1883, but it was the next stage of the trip that was particularly pertinent to us, for it was on the following leg of the trip from Buenos Aires to Barbados that Knight had his first encounter with Trinidade, a rugged island in the middle of the south Atlantic which, along with the rocks of Martin Vaz, defies the solitude of this place. At the time, Knight was receiving a severe battering at the hands of the great ‘sugar storms’ or Pampero that rage off the west coast of South America. After coming within a whisker of being overwhelmed by some heavy seas during the height of this storm, the Falcon was then plagued by headwinds and squalls and Knight decided to break the trip with a visit to this lonely island.

Initial impressions were not favourable, with Knight describing it as ‘a wild and uninviting spot.’ He and his crew struggled to land in the heavy surf and, on finally landing, they found the island almost entirely dead; a horrible crumbling mass of volcanic debris, covered in parts by a forest of long dead trees and mostly inhabited by hideous giant land crabs that constantly menaced them throughout their visit. After nine days of exploration, Knight put the island to his rudder with little expectation or desire to ever return to this godforsaken spot.

Trinidade Treasure Hunt

Yet in 1889 he was back with his new yacht, the Alerte a 64ft ketch built by Ratsey of Cowes. The reason for this volte face? In the intervening years, Knight had stumbled upon the myth of the lost treasure of Trinidade and he wanted a crack at lifting the stuff.

The mythical tale went something like this: In 1820 the city of Lima, so long under the yoke of Spanish Imperial rule, was about to fall into the hands of Chilean freedom fighters. At the time, Lima was one of the richest cities in South America, crammed with the booty of all those years of Spanish pillaging of the Incas. With the city on the brink of falling, the Spanish sought to take as much treasure away as they could. There was just the small question of how? One answer presented itself in the form of the Mary Dear, a British ship anchored off the city. In desperation, the Viceroy of Lima approached the captain of this ship, a man by the name of Thompson, and asked if he would carry the contents of the cathedral, millions of dollars worth of idols and gold plate, to a safe holding in Mexico. Thompson agreed and the ship was duly loaded with its precious cargo which was guarded by six Spanish soldiers. Predictably, captain and crew were unable to resist temptation and, as soon as they were offshore, the soldiers were murdered and the treasure seized. In the most popular version of this tall tale, the treasure was taken to the Cocos Islands, but another version placed it in Trinidade. Knight got wind of this and, with his natural sense of adventure and good knowledge of the island, was unable to resist the lure of the treasure. He purchased and fitted out the Alerte and set forth once more to this godforsaken island. 

The voyage to Trinidade passed without note and, on 20 November, the island was visible. This was when his troubles commenced. The island was dreadfully exposed to the Atlantic swell and Knight knew that there was but one suitable anchorage and even then you had to anchor well off, as it didn’t pay to get too close in to the shore. Even on a breezy day you could get trapped in the wind shadow of the island and face certain destruction. Adjacent to the anchorage was also the best landing place, a ledge of rock shaped like a quayside. If the weather was calm, you could pull alongside this but if the swell was running, you had to swim the last section, braving the sharks that were particularly abundant in this area. Knight’s main problem was that the supposed site of the treasure was on the other side of the island, which meant a two and a half mile traverse of those crumbly, treacherous peaks and ravines. Fortunately, on his previous trip he had scouted out a way across and was confident this would work. 

Land Crabs on Trinidade

Armed with this knowledge of just how tricky things could be, Knight and the cook formed a scouting party and, as soon as they landed, they were beset by the land crabs: “A loathsome lot of brutes… they have shells of a bright, saffron colour and their faces have a most cynical and diabolic expression. As one approaches they stand on their hind legs and wave their pincers threateningly while they roll their hideous goggle eyes at one in a dreadful manner. If a man is sleeping or sitting down quietly, these creatures will come up to have a bite at him, and would devour him if he were unable for some reason to shake them off.”

Their task was to find the site of the treasure, but the mountain pass was fraught with danger, for the whole island was very unstable with many landslips. This meant that descending was particularly tricky. On the steep slopes there was a real danger that you simply became part of a landslide. The only way to get down was via one of the narrow ravines that had been carved through the volcanic surface. The problem was that many of these ravines simply concluded, many in a sheer cliff, still many metres from the sea. Some of these ravines were so unstable that getting back to the top was virtually impossible. After much searching, Knight found the correct ravine that he had used on his previous visit to the island and descended the gully, all the while being attacked by the Gannets that nested there. Finally they reached the beach where the treasure was buried.

On returning to the anchorage, Knight discovered that the Alerte was gone and when she reappeared he found that she had come within an ace of being wrecked after her anchor had dragged and some sloppy handling had allowed her to get too close in to the land where only a fortunate slant of wind had saved her from destruction. 

With a camp scouted out, all that remained was to ship supplies to shore and then embark on the arduous trip across the island. The spot where the treasure had been marked on the map had unfortunately been covered by a landslide and the treasure hunters spent three arduous months digging in the searing heat to absolutely no avail. Finally, in early February, with the weather worsening and a heavy swell making it increasingly hazardous to land on the island, the decision was taken to abandon the search. The Alerte headed to Trinidad in the Caribbean and was laid up there, with the company returning to England by steamer. Knight seemed phlegmatic about his failure to lift the treasure and you sense that the trip was more about the adventure than anything else. 

Unquestionably, E F Knight’s voyage was one of the trail blazing bluewater cruises and his narrative of the adventure, ‘The Cruise of the Alerte’ continues to inspire adventurers to this day. 

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