Every autumn I think of my late Uncle Willie. From an early age he used to cycle from his home in Dublin's Sandymount to the Phoenix Park, where he collected specimens of butterflies and moths. These he mounted in glass cases which he made himself. He also collected birds and small animals.
Willie Walters worked for my father in a small electrical manufacturing business and I would spend hours there as a child listening to stories about wildlife while he controlled coil-winding machines. He was also musical and years earlier he had made his own violin which he had played in a ship's orchestra as a ticket to New York, only to arrive in time for the Wall Street crash in 1929.
In 1936 "Nuncs", as I called him, saw from the top of a tram a man called Shorty Keegan walking on the street. He knew Shorty was a sailor and thought Shorty could somehow get him a berth to Morocco. Why to Morocco?, you might ask. Well, what "Nuncs" wanted most of all was an Atlas Moth, and he reckoned the place to look was in the Atlas Mountains.
Foreign Legion
Once before he had gone to the French Embassy in Dublin to try to join the Foreign Legion with a view to being sent to North Africa, but the consul told him he must be mad to dream of volunteering for such an ordeal, and sent him packing.
Shorty told him over a pint that he was about to leave on a Wexford sailing schooner, the 150-ton Diolinda, for the Seychelles Islands. He could get Willie a berth on it, he said, but its first port of call was to be Cape Town. Willie said nothing about Morocco or moths.
A few days later Willie said his goodbyes and joined the crew to operate the auxiliary engine - an item of machinery about which he knew nothing. The family tried to discourage him, but he said that as he was not married this was his chance to come home with plenty of specimens which he would donate to the Natural History Museum. I think he saw himself as a sort of latter-day Darwin.
But after three-and-a-half months, when the Diolinda had failed to reach any port, the ship was given up for lost. I remember my mother and her sisters wearing black. Then, after 126 days, the Diolinda limped into Cape Town on September 17th with her deckhouse washed away by storms and the crewmen shouting "water, water" even before she had docked.
Eating sharks
I went to Cape Town a few years ago to see the large reports in the newspapers of the time about the epic voyage, possibly the longest that had ever been made by an Irish sailing craft without touching land. At one stage they had been only 40 miles east of Cape San Rocque in Brazil and were eating sharks and collecting rainwater in sails. The faulty engine had packed up within the first week.
Public donations were invited by the British consul and the schooner was repaired and fitted with a radio for the next part of the voyage up the Indian Ocean. But "Nuncs" still dreamed of Atlas Moths. So, while still in Cape Town, he jumped ship and set out to walk the length of the African continent to reach Morocco. But he had got only about 600 miles when a policeman appeared on horseback while Willie was skinning a snake which had been hit by a car. Our intrepid traveller was put on a spare horse which the policemen was bringing to be shod and he had to ride an uncomfortable four miles to jail. A week later he rejoined the ship in Port Elizabeth to receive the wrath of Captain Voss for delaying the voyage. While sailing up the Indian Ocean the 119-foot vessel was nearly lost again, but she managed to complete the trip. Willie loved the islands and would have stayed awhile, but he was sent back to Britain by steamer according to the original arrangement. He was given no pay for his year's work because of his misbehaviour in South Africa, and he had to ask the Missions to Seamen in London for the fare to Dublin.
Seychelles stamp
The Diolinda, which traded between Mombasa and Indian Ocean islands for several years afterwards, was nearly wrecked twice again but was restored. It was illustrated on a Seychelles Islands stamp. Its whereabouts now are unknown, but a sister ship, the De Wadden, has been saved and is on view in a Liverpool maritime museum.
I was very excited when "Nuncs" got home and immediately I wanted to see his specimens. He then told, after family scoldings, how he had lost everything between the storms and the hopping and trotting. "You mean to say you got nothing?" I said, bitterly disappointed. "Nothing except this," he replied, opening a pocket book he had made from a bit of old sail. He took out a few dried leaves which he swore were of shamrock. "I found them in a stream near Johannesburg," he declared.