Bonus: Lives Less Ordinary presents, Hold Fast!

0:00Giulia Baccosi:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

0:52Hi, I'm Asya Fuchs and welcome to this bonus episode in the documentary from the BBC World Service. I host the BBC's Lives Less Ordinary podcast, Extraordinary Stories from Around the World. To hear every episode, search for Lives Less Ordinary wherever you find your BBC podcasts. What would you do if your world shrunk to 300 square metres and you had no say over who you shared it with. If you were on a ship, at sea, far from loved ones, and didn't know when you'd be able to set foot on land again and get home. How would you cope? In January 2020, the Avantour, a sailing cargo ship, set off from Germany, heading for the Caribbean.

1:40On board, a crew of 15 with a mission to transport olive oil, cacao, coffee and rum across the Atlantic and back. But before they even made it halfway, everything they counted on would be thrown to the winds. I'm Siobhan Maxveni and you're listening to Lives Less Ordinary presents Hold Fast from the BBC World Service. Over the next eight episodes, we'll be bringing you the story of 15 people, 188 days at sea, and one extraordinary voyage. Episode 1. Signs from the Universe

2:53We begin in a train station in Italy with a young woman called Giulia Boccosi. It's December 2019. Giulia is carrying her life's belongings on her back and she's fresh from a nine-month voyage her first working as a ship's cook. She doesn't feel like it's a job she chose, exactly. Somehow it found her. But she's fallen in love with it. On her left forearm is a tattoo of a Viking compass, an old Icelandic design meant to help its bearer to find their way in rough weather. Julia's weaving through crowds to catch a train to Sicily, where a new job awaits her. I am on my way across Italy, heading to Sicily with all my life packed, ready to move there and settle down for a little while.

3:50But there is something in my guts that tries to whisper to me that maybe this is not what is going to make me happy. My heart tells me that I maybe should reconsider it.

4:10At the same time, in a harbour in northern Germany, Cornelius Bockermann is overseeing some running repairs to a sailing cargo ship. He is the captain and owner of the Avantair, a two-masted century-old sailing ship whose name means adventure. She carries around 70 tonnes of cargo, usually across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean, almost entirely powered by wind. Because Cornelius, along with a small community of like-minded seafarers, wants to change the way we transport goods across the world. And boats, well, they just want to rot and break all the time. And so Cornelius is in a hurry, readying his ship for imminent departure.

4:59Of course, you're always running late, you're always running short on time. And one of these days, I was called up on deck, and maybe I was a bit too quick. Well, I swung around too wide with an open hand and hit my hand right against that steel doorframe. You don't want to know what I felt, and you don't want to know what curses I uttered. The Avanteur is due to depart for a cargo run to the Caribbean in just a matter of days. My hand started swelling, and it was blue and swollen in the evening. Then the x-ray found two cracks in it. It was operated on, got two little bolts in it. And only the next day, the realisation dawned on me that with this hand, I can't sail.

5:42Cornelius now needs to find a replacement captain and fast. And then the ship's cook calls to say that his father's in hospital, so he can't sail either. Cornelius begins to call every contact he can think of to find replacements. Meanwhile, across Europe, in Italy. The old year of 2019 is running out fast. It's New Year's Eve. Julia breaks up her journey with a stop in Tuscany to welcome in the new decade with old friends. And that night, while everybody is toasting, celebrating new beginnings, I wonder about my upcoming new beginning.

6:33I have lots of questions swirling into my mind and very little answers. So I look up at the sky and I ask the universe for a sign to let me know if I was on the right path or not. and I specify please be clear with your answer please make sure that it will be loud enough for me to hear it

7:05and then at some point my phone rings

7:12and it's a message from a friend of mine who is on a ship called Avontour and they desperately need a ship cook.

7:26Could I ask for a clearer message than this? I was stunned. I couldn't believe about the effectiveness and the promptness of the universe's telecommunication systems. I wait no seconds to call the captain, of course. And that captain is... Cornelius. He offers me a contract on board the ship for six months, six days on, one day off, starting next week. He gave me 24 hours to answer. Julia calls her partner, Colin. He's due to meet her in Sicily, but after some quick deliberations, the answer is clear. I go back to Cornelius and I tell him, OK, you've got to cook, but I have one condition. Three months, not one day longer.

8:21I come with you to Mexico, and there I will leave. Cornelius accepts Julia's terms. So, yeah, it's a good compromise for everybody. We're happy, let's go. And then I go.

8:44Julia heads straight for Bremen in Germany. where the Aventur and Cornelius are waiting. There's just time to update her Facebook page and tell friends, I've accepted a last-minute offer of work. I'll be back, just a little more salty. Julia can't possibly have any idea how much this will change her life.

9:15I walk from the station to the quayside and in front of me there is the ship it's just a buzzing beehive full of people loading bags and boxes running around and they know that the new cook is coming I jumped straight on it like hey hello my name is julia hey how are you meanwhile you're getting to know everybody's names finding out what are you missing what you would like to have but at the same time oh look this is all the invoices there was so much to take in it was chaos but there was this sense of beautiful excitement that was really palpable. Julia is given a tour of her new home. She's not sailed this particular ship before, but some things are always the same.

10:12When you step on board a ship, you have to learn a new language. Everything has a different name. The toilet is not toilet, it's the heads. The sleep room is not the sleep room, it's the foxhole. and the front is not the front, it's the foredeck or the bow. The back is not the back, it's the aft or the stern. And the kitchen is not the kitchen, it's the galley. My temple. There's a big table, stove, sink, benches around the table and a lot of light. There is lots of portals, I really remember. I say, wow, so much light getting in. It's going to be amazing to cook in it and see the waves in all directions.

10:57And there is another very important place of my daily life, which is the dry store. This is where most of the fresh food for the voyage is stored, piled up in open ventilated boxes, needing to last for weeks at a time without refrigeration before being restocked. So, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, I go down the stairs and I enter into this little tiny room which holds all our fresh goods. I check all the crates and fill one by one all the vegetables inside and have a chat with them. How are you doing this morning? Feel like becoming a nice stew? Feeling like to be chopped into a nice salad? Selecting the lucky ones that can ascend to the realm of the galley to become delicious food ready for feeding a hungry sailor's belly.

11:52With these goods, I will make the meal planned for the day.

11:58From the dry store, there is a little ladder that leads you on the main center deck where you will find the cargo hatch, which is big. And inside, there is the cargo hold, this big belly of the ship. And the cargo hold is the place where all the sacks of coffee and beans of cacao are going to be stored. And the biggest space on board is for this cargo. So for the humans, sleeping arrangements are more cramped. Like you open the door, you have a little triangle of floor, and then you have two bunk beds that are hidden behind the curtains, which is your only veil that protects your very, very, very basic, not to say, inexistent privacy.

12:53Before they set sail, there's one more important job Julia must do. So when you join a sailing ship, one of the first things when you roll is you hand over your passport to your captain because you will not need your passport because you are part of the ship. you're part of the crew. And eventually a replacement captain is found. The avanteur now has a full crew and their departure date is set for the 17th of January 2020. But Cornelius is uncomfortable. He has ploughed his savings into the ship and this is the first time she will depart without him. I would have really, really preferred to be on board myself.

13:37Under these conditions, in this kind of weather, at this time of the season. It's a challenging job. I assume that I know my ship best.

13:55And then one good morning at dawn with the sails and we head for the North Sea.

14:09It was cold and it was rough. It was Force 8 in the North Sea in the winter with a crew of mostly unexperienced people. Seasickness was there to accompany us, but nothing new. It is daily bread for ships like this. and then little by little, day after day, wave after wave, we pass Dover, we sail into the English Channel, we cross the TSS, pass the westernmost part of Brittany and then we get the gale warning. There is a huge low-pressure system coming into Biscay against us. The bay of Biscay can be treacherous. Weather and geology combined create often huge waves, and the crew are not all experienced.

15:13So the ship pauses to wait out the storm safely in a sheltered bay in Brittany.

15:22We ended up staying for 10 days at anchor. It's a perfect occasion for everybody to find their ways, settle down, settle in with different games to learn the lines, learn knots by playing, which is a very beautiful way to bind the crew.

15:53And then after a few days we heaved anchor. It's not something you push on a bottom and anchor magically gets back on deck. There is a winch, which is powered by the force of the crew. And then you turn and you turn and you turn and there is quite some inertia and speed and it's heavy and you sweat and you ask, change! And there is somebody that comes and takes your place and then... And you go and you go. And then we are free.

16:30And we are on the way.

16:36We have dolphins that come to wish us fair winds and we set sails into the Bay of Biscay. It's the first time where you actually encounter the beautiful, mighty Atlantic swell.

16:57And the colour of the seas change. so the North Sea is very green and the middle of the Atlantic is very, very blue. We have some more turquoise areas and there are some seas that are close to the land so they can be more grey. The sea is not just blue.

17:34The Avon Tour is now in the open Atlantic, heading in a southerly direction, past Portugal, when the wind dies. The sea is flat and the ship stops completely. One of the curiosities of life on board ship is that although you may be surrounded by water, you can almost never swim in it. The wind and the current make it too dangerous. But today is different. There's no wind, no swell. One of these windless days, the sea chart tells us that there is 4 ,000 metres of deep blue ocean underneath us. We rig a plank, we walk the plank, we jump into the ocean and we have a swim.

18:28and then you just dive a little bit down and you open your eyes and it's just the most overwhelming sense of immensity you could imagine

18:44there is something really really powerful feeling yourself surrounded by all this infinity

18:55When the wind returns, the Avantour sails past the southern tip of Portugal, past the coast of Morocco and onto the Canary Islands, where, after 36 days at sea, on the 22nd of February 2020, she approaches the harbour of Santa Cruz to Tenerife. We finally approach on the chart the Canaries. but we can't see the canaries, we can't see the land because there is a Kalima storm blowing. Kalima is an easterly wind that comes from the Sahara and blows all the red dust from the desert, sweeping the archipelago and when the Kalima blows, the sky turns orange. And the ship, which is white, gets covered into this orange dust.

19:57The light gets very dim. It feels a bit apocalyptic.

20:05We can hear far away that there is huge celebrations going on. We completely forgot that it's carnival time. Santa Cruz de Tenerife hosts one of the most crowded, intense carnival celebrations worldwide. And we are in the middle of it. We moored in the harbour and the first foot we step on land is in the craziness of 10 ,000 people let loose in streets, party guard swept with Sahara desert sand everywhere around us. And we had to say, what to do? Let's join the party. And so we did.

21:15Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.

21:48So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

22:07The next morning, nursing hangovers, the crew begin to ready their ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Some information reaches them as they work. Some holidaymakers on the island are confined to their hotel with a mystery virus. They're quarantined. But it's just a scrap of local news, and not something that affects their voyage, so it's soon forgotten. And they're about to pick up a new crew member, Christiane de Berkelar. Christian is an academic doing research on the decarbonisation of the shipping industry. He'll be with the ship as a deckhand for about three weeks until they reach the Caribbean.

22:46He's sailed on ships like the Aventure before.