The first question everyone asks after you have been on a tall ship is: “Did you climb the rigging?” Here now, looming over the ship, are two masts, each about 98ft high. For weeks beforehand, not being a circus performer or extreme window-cleaner, the question of whether I’d be up to it had been looming over me.

I knew by heart the passage in Patrick O’Brian’s novel Master and Commander, when Stephen Maturin, “in a state of rapidly increasing terror”, climbs aloft for the first time: “Forty feet is no very great height, but it seems far more lofty, aerial and precarious when there is nothing but an insubstantial yielding ladder of moving ropes underfoot.”

Of course, these days you blandly assume you will wear a safety harness. Well, yes you do, but, as I discovered, there is nothing to clip it onto until you reach the foretop platform — and that happened to be 60ft up on this ship. Then there was another wrinkle. Maturin is able to go straight up on to the foretop through a gap called the “lubber’s hole”, a “convenient square hole next to the mast itself”, although proper sailors ignore this and instead climb round the overhang “by clinging to the futtock shrouds”. The idea of clambering round an overhang on a swaying mast several storeys up in the air haunted me and I had decided that if I managed to get up that high, I would go through the lubber’s hole. So it was with some alarm that I realised the foretop above me did not have a lubber’s hole: it was clinging to the futtock shrouds or nothing.

I am not comfortable with heights, and nobody on board has to do this, but as everyone’s question implicitly recognises, “climbing the rigging” is the defining tall-ship experience. I swung my leg over the side and started up the main shrouds (that’s the rope-ladder-type rigging up the side of the mast). Into my mind popped a fascinating statistic that I had not told my wife before setting off. During the Napoleonic wars, Britain lost 92,386 sailors, only 6,663 of whom were killed by the enemy. The others (93%) died through disease, shipwreck or accident: ie, a lot of them fell off.

Up I went, not looking down, not looking up. I went round the futtock shrouds in one breath (I nearly passed out, but at least I avoided hyperventilating). Then I stood on the foretop. I looked up: above me stretched almost as much mast again as I had climbed. The topmast shrouds swayed in the breeze. I glanced down at the deck, so far away. The thought of having to swing back under the futtock shrouds already gnawed at my stomach. What was the possibility of spending the whole voyage up here and being taken off by the fire brigade when we were back in harbour? My grip tightened. I decided to go down before I became cataleptic.

Back on deck, I felt a vague sense of achievement. The ship might have been at anchor in a calm bay with three of the crew on hand, but I could still say I have been aloft in a square-rigger. (My brush with death would come later.)

IT WAS my first morning aboard the Soren Larsen. We had spent the night anchored in Smugglers Cove, Whangarei Heads, off the northeast coast of New Zealand, and were about to spend five days sailing around the islands of the Hauraki Gulf. I’m not sure whether I was indulging a fantasy, a midlife crisis or coming to terms with our national identity. A psychologist would say my reasons were overdetermined; my wife just says I’m pretentious. Having found the film version of Master and Commander fantastically exciting, I decided there are two essential characteristics to being English: the ability to fly a Spitfire and to sail a square-rigged ship. I had done neither.

If you have a dream of sailing ships, then the Soren Larsen has probably figured in your imagination already, for she was the ship in The Onedin Line cleaving the waves to the strains of Khachaturian: and if that’s not your era, she has also appeared in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and, more recently, Shackleton. For all that she was built in Denmark in 1949 and worked as a cargo ship in the Baltic until 1972, she is essentially a 19th-century oak brigantine. Now based in Auckland, she earns her keep giving paying passengers the experience of square-rigger sailing.

Those passengers — “voyage crew”, as we were called — numbered 19 on my trip, 15 of them women. Most were single, on adventure holidays: all were spending several weeks travelling around New Zealand, and the voyage was just an incidental part of their itinerary. “So, you’re not Master and Commander fans at all, then?” Blank looks. Still, everyone had their own romance invested in the ship. Maggie, a physio in her twenties from Telford, had a hankering for a Swallows and Amazons-type adventure; Judy, an Australian in her sixties, had always wanted to see a full moon from a tall ship.

The three other men were in their sixties. I found Dennis, a refugee from the Canadian winter, on deck just before dawn studying the stars. Here was a man who wore grey socks with sandals (when it rained, he wrapped his feet in plastic bags and then put his sandals on); still he had enough poetry in his soul to be enraptured by the southern sky. But it was Ron who would turn out to be the most romantic of all.

AT FIRST, the ship appears to be a bewildering forest of ropes, but, directed by the permanent crew, we began to understand the beautiful simplicity of its logic. It’s a bit sad, but having been baffled by the jargon in O’Brian’s books, I got quite a kick out of shouting “Upper tops’l bunts and clew, let go.” Picking up nautical terminology comes quickly, largely because when you let go of, say, the clews and bunts, you are rewarded with the sight of the sail shaking itself free of the yardarm, cascading down and catching the wind.

As soon as the sails were set, I lay back in the bowsprit netting (ie, out at the front) and looked back at the ship. This is what I had come for. The sound of the sea running on the bow, the sails startlingly white against the blue sky, the taste of the sea on the air and the motion of a ship at sea. I lost hours lying out there.

In proper nautical manner, we had been divided into watches responsible for running the ship for four-hour periods. (You don’t have to take part if you don’t want to, you can lie around reading, but where’s the fun in that?) My watch was 8 to 12, and as we sailed into the night after that first full day, we were quite busy: as well as setting the sails, we were taking the helm, standing lookout, checking the bilge and entering the ship’s position in the log.

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