What keeps you safe at sea?

Inside an old jewellery box sits a yellowing fang set in a gold mount. It is the triangular molar wrenched from a shark jaw trolled for somewhere in the South Atlantic at the turn of the 19th century.

- DICK DURHAM

Those fishing for the predator included my grandfather, Richard Stephens Durham, then a teenage apprentice aboard the three-masted barque, Pass of Killiecrankie. Sharks' teeth were highly prized by tallship sailors as a lucky talisman to bestow safe passage on the wearer, or to ward off the razor-jawed creatures should a matelot suffer the misfortune of becoming a man overboard.

I had long ago heard how Grandpa survived stowing sail aloft on that same ship while a fellow apprentice lost his footing on the yard arm and fell to his death in the sea below. But until recently I had little idea of the charmed life Grandpa had spent at sea until his retirement as master in the Port Line back in 1948.

While researching what had happened to his old ships – Pass of Brander was the second sailing ship he served in loading guano from Valparaiso in Chile for the farmers' fields of Europe - I discovered how close he came to slumber in Davy Jones' locker rather than the Sussex old folks' home where he took his last breath.

His first ship out of sail was the