The call of the sea

Cutty Sark was dead even before she went up in flames. Celebrating British maritime achievement must involve keeping ships afloat, argues Adam Nicolson

We usually love a wreck. People can put on very po faces about this, but it is undeniable that the sight of a huge, carefully made ship jammed up against the rocks, its bow canted at all the wrong angles, even its propeller spinning in the surf, is mesmeric, danger made visible, filled with a neck-tingling horror.

Big house fires are the same - Windsor was never more beautiful than when it burned in 1992 - but the fire at the Cutty Sark this week didn't have that effect on me at all. There was none of that excited, rubbernecking, delight-in-horror. Instead, the destruction seemed just that: destruction, a demolition job. Something fine and lovely had gone, its inherited meaning destroyed, and that was that.

Why did it have that effect? Why was there no frisson to the death of the Cutty Sark? Partly, I think, it is because we have failed so miserably to look after our old boats and ships. In some ways the life of the Cutty Sark, imprisoned in its concrete bed, had already been stripped away. A huge fuss was made in the 1970s about the destruction of the English country house - and a great conservation movement emerged from it. But the maritime heritage of this country has not only been severely damaged; it has almost disappeared.

There is HMS Victory and the 1860s iron-clad Warrior at Portsmouth and maybe still some version of the Cutty Sark, all great ships; there are boats at Greenwich and at the National Maritime Museum's outpost in Falmouth, Cornwall. And there is a neglected and desperately underfunded collection of old sailing craft at Eyemouth in the Scottish Borders. But nothing floats. The only square-rigged ships still sailing are replicas, mostly used for films.

An entire tranche of national life has been erased from the world. Apart from the Victory, the last surviving hull of any ship that was present at Trafalgar was used as target practice for gunners during the last war. For a nation said to be obsessed with its past, this is a curious state of affairs. British maritime history has, essentially, been broken up for scrap. It's gone.

The French are a little better than us. Apart from a small 19th-century cargo vessel that works out of Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico, there is only one authentic square-rigged vessel from the great days still sailing. It is called the Belem, an old cocoa boat which is now the property of a charitable foundation underwritten by the French government. They pay €1m (£678,000) a year, half the costs, to subsidise the real active sailing life of this wonderful 190ft-long ocean-going sailing ship. I crewed on her a couple of years ago. A tricolour the size of a tennis court floats from her mizzen gaff. Everything about her shines and glimmers. Every sail on the 10 huge yards that are suspended from the main and the fore masts is exactly furled, every bit of brass is polished, every piece of running rigging is clean and white as if newly washed, every block for every tackle is painted bright white, every inch of deck holystoned, every handrail varnished.

The Belem may be just a chocolate boat for the Brazil trade, but if you find it tied up in some Atlantic or Mediterranean port, it looks like the most seductive monument to human ingenuity and ambition ever made. I first joined the Belem in Bilbao and the sight of it towering over the quays reminded me of the passage in William Cobbett's autobiography, when as a boy in the 1770s he first saw the grand fleet "riding at anchor at Spithead. I had heard of the wooden walls of Old England: I had formed my ideas of a ship, and of a fleet; but what I now beheld, so far surpassed what I had ever been able to form a conception of, that I stood lost between astonishment and admiration".

But the Belem is no static monument. She sails. Her professional crew are so at ease in their complex, highly technical and breathtakingly beautiful world that you can't help be entranced. They make it a model of everything it might be.

The days I spent sailing that ship are some of the most unforgettable of my life and the sight of the full suit of the Belem's sails up and drawing is burned into my mind. It is ridiculous that I only know the sails of a square-rigger by their French names: the Grand Voile and the Misaine, the Hunier fixe and the Hunier volant, with the perroquets above that and the cacatois above them, the grand foc and the faux foc out on the bowsprit, and the diablotin and the marquise hoisted between the main and mizzen, but I remember them all, I have hauled them all to the wind and I have seen them all working, all concordant with each other, all part of a single, complex, integrated whole, as if the sails themselves were a crew made of canvas.

Surging along under all of this, a field of canvas on masts rising 80 feet above the deck, listening to the incomparable sound of a sailing ship gushing and hissing as it plunges into each new swell: that is one of the world's great experiences. "I have never seen anything so wonderful," I said to one Breton crewman on the wheel beside me one night as we were making our way across the Bay of Biscay. It was four in the morning and the phosphorescence was trailed out behind us in the wake like our own version of the Milky Way. He was just going off watch, having been on since midnight, and looked exhausted. "Thank you," he said. "That is why we do this."

Only the state or vast private money enamoured of the sea could do such a thing. The Belem relies on the annual interest of a €20m fund. In this country, we haven't managed to do anything of the kind. The best we are up to is the sadly deadened experiences of walking around ships stuck in their dry docks, stiffened, immobile, soundless, challengeless, supremely safe, with no escargots in parsley or delicious chocolate pots emerging from galley, no sight on the dawn watch of Venus laying her path across the swells. One of the reasons the burning of the Cutty Sark felt so dead is precisely because the poor ship has not had the life of the Belem. If I heard that the Belem had foundered or been burned, I'm sure I would have wept.

In the wake of the Cutty Sark disaster, I wonder if there isn't something we can do about this. We have lost our ancient ships but instead of concentrating on the static experience, the school-history tour, we should think of putting a Belem-style life back into the idea of a boat. Every boat is made to live and thrive in the conditions of sea and wind it has been shaped to expect. In my experience nothing is more enlivening than sailing a boat in a sea for which it has been designed. Not a plastic off the shelf job, but a craft, either old and restored or a replica, which a set of deep and rich traditions has made.

A few years ago, I had a small wooden boat built in the Hebrides and used it as a way of exploring those islands and seas for a book. The man who made it, John MacAulay of Flodabay in Harris, was severity itself. "Do you think I'll make a good sailor?" I asked him.

"If you had another life," he said, dragging on the roll-up.

Freyja, who I named after the Norse goddess of sex and wellbeing, is 16ft long and 6ft 2in across at the widest part, with a dipping lug rig, the hull made of larch planks on oak frames, with oak thwarts and an oak rudder tipped in galvanised steel.

Everything about her is derived from Norwegian boats, brought to the Hebrides from Norway over many generations and adapted here, even up until the early 20th century. She is not a very large dinghy, but a very small ship. All the principles of sea-kindliness, of robustness of construction and yet lightness of form, of a craft designed to protect its crew and save their lives, were poured into her.

It is knowledge transmitted across the ages to John MacAulay, to his meticulous workshop and into the boat itself. She is as full-bodied and robust as it needs to be, big in the bilges, but not more than that. She is no butcher of a thing, but with a slightness for all her strength. John had forged the iron for the mooring rings, the eyebolts and hooks for the single halyard, the pins for the rowlocks and the gudgeons and pintles for the rudder. Everything about her is fully itself, designed not only for appearance but to last and to work in difficult and harsh conditions. Nothing is too heavy or too massive.

"How long will she last ?" I asked John on the day I was to take her to sea for the first time.

"Longer than you," he said.

Crossing the Minch in a small boat can be terrifying. Waves have a way of landing on board and needing to be pumped out. Halfway between the islands can feel like a long way from anywhere. But the boat itself is so surely made, honed by the experience of other boats in these steep-waved tidal waters, that Freyja knows what she is doing even when the man on the helm feels a little lost.

And when you trust the boat, she takes on a life of her own, a fast-going buoyancy, a readiness for what is coming next. Arriving with her in the nooks and crevices of Hebridean harbours, when at last the water lies flat around you, and the small harbour waves rattle up against the strakes of the hull, or coming into the temporary lee of an island, is as deep and gratifying a sense of arrival as I have ever enjoyed.

We all hate the heritage word, but I do not know of a richer way than this of understanding and getting in touch with the past, and learning with some humility about the courage and ingenuity and readiness to work of the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived on the coasts of the world. At different ends of the scale, Freyja and the Belem are what marine heritage should be about.

Some people are already doing it. The an Sulaire Trust, based in Stornoway, is a model of what might be done: a reproduction of a sgoth, a large, beautiful, Viking-derived sailing boat, is run by the trust and has introduced hundreds of people to the ways of the sailing past in the Hebrides. There is a restored and sailing fifie, the Reaper, at Anstruther on the east coast of Scotland and there are other passionate advocates in Britain of this rapidly disappearing world - the poets Ian Stephen in Lewis and Katrina Porteous on the Northumberland coast, the painter James Dodds in Suffolk, Dr Robert Prescott at St Andrews University who restored the Anstruther fifie - but it is a steep and uphill struggle.

What is needed is a necklace of boat sheds, every one different, every one fitting its place, in which the boats of that particular place live and from which they go out into the sea. Our sheds would be like the lifeboat sheds but for the boats of the place. Old ones would be looked after and new ones made. People would learn to sail them and use them. You don't want boats stuck in a small boats museum where they die like butterflies in a box. Perhaps the death of the Cutty Sark will be the spur that will bring our relationship to the sea and its past - its life-enhancing, experience-enriching past - alive again.

· Adam Nicolson is the author of Sea Room and Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero, among other books

British sea power
A brief history

The British coastline is about 8,000 miles long - more than twice as long as the coast of Spain and three times that of France. Alfred the Great was the first British monarch to launch a fleet of ships - he did it to repel a Viking invasion.

Henry VIII built a fleet of fighting ships armed with large guns and created a naval administration. Under Elizabeth I the navy became England's major defence and the means by which the empire was extended. In 1577, Francis Drake was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world via the Pacific south of the tip of South America.

The East India Company was founded in 1600, competing for the rich Indian Ocean trade in spices and luxury goods. In 1769 James Cook began the first of three expeditions to the South Pacific. He surveyed the islands of New Zealand, discovered the Great Barrier Reef, and charted 4,000 miles of coastline.

Led by Nelson, the Royal Navy defeated the French at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 after which the navy was never again challenged by Napoleon.

During the 19th century, the Royal Navy enforced the Pax Britannica: the long period of relative peace between the European states which depended ultimately on British maritime supremacy.

1838 saw the first steam ships cross the Atlantic Ocean. British explorer Verney L Cameron became the first European to cross equatorial Africa from sea to sea in 1875. The Liverpool-registered Titanic, one of the most luxurious ships in the world, sank in April 1912, on its maiden voyage to New York City, killing about 1,500 passengers.

During the 20th century the Royal Navy continued to be the world's most powerful navy, as was the Merchant Navy: in 1939, it consisted of 1,900 ocean-going ships. After the second world war the Royal Navy was second only to the US Navy and continued to be a world leader in maritime operations. By the late 20th century the Royal Navy had declined somewhat to third largest among the world's navies, after those of the United States and the Soviet Union.