9

 

En Passant!

 

Jean-Pierre and I tackled the fleshpots of Fort de France with gusto for three days, until a plane was due to leave for Cayenne, French Guiana. We slept onboard Rose d’ Archachon to save hotel bills and during the day wandered around, seeing the sights, drinking cassis and Pernod, eating well, taking in all the movement of the colorful port, and listening to the calypso music.

Jean-Pierre, a good storyteller, gave me accounts of his previous voyages. His father had been a fisherman out of Brest, and Jean-Pierre had followed his father to sea at a very early age. By the time he was 18 he decided he would like to see more of the world than the rough gray seas of the Bay of Biscay; so he shipped in a French sailing yacht, a schooner, bound for, Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The two owners of the schooner had fallen out with each other in Rio de Janeiro and one of them had decamped back to France, leaving the other with no funds. Jean-Pierre had been summarily dismissed from the boat—stranded.

For a month, he grubbed around in the streets of Rio before finding the job of delivering a small sailing boat from Rio to Buenos Aires. This paid enough for him to make his way by air to Guadeloupe in the West Indies. From there he had delivered another small craft to New York, but the American owner of this boat had swindled him, saying he had paid for the delivery in advance. Once more Jean-Pierre was stranded. He worked as a dishwasher in Manhattan at a French restaurant on Forty-seventh Street for ten months, before he found a berth in a British yacht bound from Boston to Plymouth, England. In that way he finally got back home to Brittany. After that he worked as mate and skipper in several sailing craft, sometimes on a delivery, sometimes with the owner onboard, mainly around northwest Europe and in the Mediterranean.

His English was very basic but reasonable enough to understand. However, it was strange to hear a Breton speak with a broad New York accent, talking about “the goils” as his eyes followed the shapely lasses of Martinique.

After paying our fares to Cayenne, I still had 2,000 of Alex’s francs left, and on arrival in that steaming-hot town we checked into a hotel for the night. A cheap hotel, necessarily so, with no air conditioning and millions of bugs. As we wended our way through the oldest part of the city, with its rotting wooden storefronts and creepers threatening to weigh down the telegraph poles, we noted the strange mixture of races. Prosperous-looking blacks and Chinese and desperately-poor-looking whites, mostly old men—shoeless, with only a shirt, ragged and torn, and pants, and usually with a tattered straw hat, sitting in the gutters: some drunk, some just staring hopelessly into space. Dozens of them, lining the streets down to the river.

“Alors, Tristan, ils sont les ‘vieux blancs.’”

“Old whites?”

“Yes, they are the last of the convicts from the days when French Guiana was a penal settlement. Those with more than eight years to serve had to stay in the colony, after they had finished their time, for the same amount of time as their sentence. So if a man got 20 years’ conviction, it meant he was out here for life. They got so accustomed to it that when the French government offered to repatriate them after the Second World War, many turned the offer down. They couldn’t face returning to France. So they just hang around in Cayenne, waiting to die.”

Down on the river were a couple of hundred small wooden sailing boats, many of them Brazilian smugglers. Cattle smugglers. I learned that thousands of cattle run wild on the islands in the mouth of the Amazon. These sailors landed on the islands, defying the hazards of the world’s mightiest tides and river bore, to rustle Brahman cows. They lashed them down in the holds of their 50-foot boats and sailed all the way up to Cayenne, a run of 600 or 700 miles. Here they exchanged the cattle for Scotch whisky, which they smuggled into Brazil at a tremendous profit, which they earned every penny of the hard way.

Jean-Pierre and I spent hours talking with these smugglers, trying to find out if they knew much about the Amazon farther inland; but they knew only the mouth and the islands which clutter its 280 miles of delta. I made up my mind that one day I would tackle the Amazon.

We sat in the moonlit nights by the stinking river in Cayenne, sipping cassasa and whisky and swatting mosquitoes as the Brazilian crewboys played their rhythmic, sexy music in between the sudden, slashing rainstorms, when they dashed under their rough canvas shelters, laughing and chattering.

“There must be many treasures up the Amazon,” ruminated Jean-Pierre as we made our way back to the shabby Chinese hotel, with thousands of moths flittering around the entrance light, a bare bulb. “Gold, silver, Indian ornaments, and rare, unknown flowers.”

“Yes, and good boat-building timber by the hectare, mon ami!”

“Ah, Tristan, always you think about wood for building a boat.”

“Well, what’s the good of all the treasure if you don’t have a good boat to enjoy it in?”

“Ah, merde. Bonne nuit, mon Capitaine.”

“Bonne nuit, Jean-Pierre. But first, here’s an old trick for fooling the cockroaches. Get some canned butter in the Chinese shop and smear some around the pisspot; then the greasy half-melted butter leads the little cochons away from you, they fall into the pot, and voilà! They can’t climb out again through the butter.”

“Good idea. Merci, mon Capitaine!”

Wakened by the sticky heat at seven the next morning, Jean-Pierre and I fled from the bug-infested hotel down the road to a clean French cafe for our coffee and croissants; then, hefting our seabags, we made our way to the steamy river, where we negotiated with a vieil blanc to paddle out to Quiberon in a dugout canoe. We knew she was out at anchor but we were not quite sure where, as we had arrived too late the previous night to make inquiries at the harbor master’s office. But the vieil blanc knew where she was.

The sight that met our eyes when we finally carved our way through the thick river mist was enough to make Atilla cry. Quiberon had obviously not been moved for several years. The barnacles and other growth (for this is a tidal river) were two feet thick on her bottom. All the paintwork on her cedar sides was blistered off and her canvas cover (over the topsides) was rotted away to a few tattered fragments. There was slimy moss on the cockpit seats, and here and there dryrot had set in.

“Blimey,” I murmered, wiping the sweat from my eyes.

“Putain,” said Jean-Pierre.

The vieil blanc said nothing, sitting in his dugout and staring vacantly into space with dead, pale-blue eyes.

When I opened the companionway hatch and went below, the smell of rot and dankness would have made a Bastille dungeon seem like Helena Rubenstein’s boudoir. Everything was moldy. There was a sheen of slimy green moss over the galley stove, the berths, the navigation books, the roof, the floor, everything. The cabin was crawling with huge cockroaches, up to two inches long, thousands of them. The stink from the stagnant water in the bilge was overpowering.

“What do you think, Tristan?”

I think we’d better get to work cleaning this lot up, mon ami. There’s $2,000 waiting for us in France once we get this cranky hulk there!”

“But it will take us a month to get her ready, and it’s almost June, and the hurricane season starts at the end of July.”

“Well, then, mon ami, we’d better get moving, hadn’t we?”

The rubber dinghy belonging to Quiberon was the first thing I inspected. In harbor, at anchor, a boat’s dinghy is like a crutch to a cripple; it is often the only way to get ashore. Of course, it had rotted completely. I arranged with the vieil blanc that he would purchase a dugout for me for 40 francs, and I would pay him 50. As he paddled away, Jean-Pierre and I set to cleaning the boat inside and out with river water.

It took us three days to get the boat in a fit state for us to move onboard. Then, paddling our dugout, we made dozens of trips ashore to carry the necessary stores for the long passage ahead. The engine was rusted up solid, so it was discounted. I removed the fuel tanks from under the cockpit seat and replaced them with jerry cans for extra water. The sails, being canvas, were in a pitiful state, rotted in many places, but Jean-Pierre was an expert sailmaker. He bought some canvas from a Chinese dealer, hired his sewing machine at a very cheap rate, and we soon had a fine set of working sails and storm sails. But the first thing Jean-Pierre made was an awning, as the sun beat down cruelly. Once it was rigged in place we could work a little more comfortably, but not much.

The masts and spars of Quiberon were not in desperate shape, and I soon had them scraped and five coats of varnish on them, topped with two coats of gray paint. The canvas deck covering over the teak boarding was frayed in many places and I spent a couple of days patching it.

We hauled the boat out of the river with one of the dockyard cranes and scraped her bottom off. One of the French harbor pilots gave me some big-ship antifouling compound in exchange for Jean-Pierre’s making a sail for his racing dinghy. There was no charge for the crane and the dock berth.

Once the boat was back in the water, we were in business. It was July 2. If we were going to beat the hurricane risk, we must get out and hare to the north as fast as we could.

In Cayenne, we were too far south for hurricanes Their tracks sweep westward across the Atlantic in the area north of the latitude of Grenada. Then they change direction, mainly in a northwesterly way, toward the southeastern United States. But some of them turn due north, up toward Bermuda, when they again turn northeast and lose their force in the vast wastes of the central North Atlantic.

These latter hurricanes were the ones we were mostly concerned about, for they follow the general wind system of the Atlantic. We must follow the track they would follow, but we must get well to the east of Bermuda before the beginning of August. Otherwise we would have to hole up in some West Indies port until the beginning of October, and this would mean arriving on the European side of the Atlantic in the stormy winter season—a daunting prospect. We decided to get the hell out of Cayenne and make a run for it.

“What about another hand?” asked Jean-Pierre.

“We don’t have enough money to pay anyone, and who are we going to ask to take this voyage? A vieil blanc, probably here for murder? Some green fonctionnaire’s kid? No, my friend, our best bet is to get up to Antigua, tout de suite, and see if there are any spare hands there that want a lift back to Europe.”

On the sixth of July, after a hurried but thorough check of Quiberon, we cleared the port and scooted to the northwest on a broad reach, watching carefully, as the boat pounded over the heavy trade-wind seas, for any sign of weakness in the hull or rigging. She seemed to be holding together well, but we were back to rough sailing again after the pleasant, easy voyage in Rose d’ Archachon. We had no wind steering gear, so it was watch on, watch off on the tiller for Jean-Pierre and me, with the one off watch cooking the meals on the ancient kerosene stove and doing the eternal chores: splicing lines, repairing frayed, sails, pumping out the bilge (she leaked steadily).

Quiberon was a yawl, 36 feet long and eight feet six inches in the beam. She had a long, straight keel, drawing five feet six inches, and this eased the strain of steering as she held her course quite well while the wind was on the beam. She was cedar on oak frames, counter stern, and built in Nantes in 1936; so by this time she was showing her age. She had been sailed from France in 1940 by three Frenchmen anxious to escape the German invasion. On arrival in Cayenne, they had split up. Two of them had joined the Free French Navy in the West Indies while the other had stayed in Guiana, going into business. The latter had sailed the boat now and again during the war years and for a few years afterward, but since 1957 she had not moved. In less than a month Jean-Pierre and I had tried, by tremendous effort, to correct the ravages in a wooden vessel that had sat seven years with no maintenance in a humid tropical climate.

The reach for Antigua from Cayenne is about a thousand miles, and we had good steady winds, about 20 to 25 knots, most of the way. It was hard going, until we figured out how to make her self-steer her course by easing out the mizzen, handing (dropping) the main, and backing the big genoa. This kept her on a fairly steady course, though in an erratic manner, but it slowed her down to two and a half knots. However, in the hot afternoons it enabled Jean-Pierre and me to get some sleep.

On the ninth day out of Cayenne we sighted Barbados, away to the west. But tempted though we were to call at Bridgetown and get some rest, we pressed on at an average of three knots. Jean-Pierre on his off-watch cooked his specialties, which were mainly rice dishes: rice and curried fish, rice and corned beef, rice and sardines; while I made burgoo, to his utter disgust. However, he eventually resigned himself to it, coming to the conclusion that this must be Wales’ unique contribution to the culinary arts.

Two days later, on the seventeenth of July, we passed the mighty volcanic peak of Mont Pelée, and, piling on sail, pressing her hard, we reached English Harbour, in Antigua, that night. Wearily we went to anchor, glad of the respite from the eternal hammering as she plunged across the tracks of the seas rolling in from the Atlantic deeps, scoffed a basinful of hot burgoo, and turned in.

In the morning, after our first night’s rest since Cayenne, Jean-Pierre and I set to to prepare the boat for a fast passage to the area southeast of Bermuda, 800 miles to the north of Antigua. We would again be on a broad reach—that is, cutting across the track of the prevailing southeast winds. Once we reached the turning point southeast of Bermuda, we could turn east and hightail it out of the hurricane area as fast as we could.

“Do you think we can get an extra crew member here, Tristan?” asked Jean-Pierre. “It would enable us to press on all day and all night. We could make 110 miles a day, instead of 75. That would give us a much better chance of being out of the hurricane area much quicker.”

“I’ll go to the Admiral Nelson pub and have a look round; look, why don’t you come with me? I’ll teach you to play darts.”

“Non, merci! The British drink too much beer. It swells my stomach.” He patted his stomach with one palm. “And then I feel like a pig: pouf!” He exploded his lips, as Frenchmen do, for an expletive.

“O.K., I’ll tell you what: You stand onboard and make a fancy supper, and if I find someone I’ll bring him back for supper and we’ll tempt him with the grub. Make him eager, see?”

“Bonne idée, mon Capitaine.”

In those days English Harbour, on the south coast of Antigua, was slowly developing into what it is now the major rendezvous for trans-Atlantic small craft eastward and westward bound from and to Europe and the West Indies. Captain Nicholson was doing an extraordinary job of converting Admiral Nelson’s old dockyard, built to maintain the wooden ships of the late 1700s, into a first-class base for modern sailing craft. The ancient cobblestone jetties, with great capstans and beautiful rose-pink warehouses, all constructed with a Georgian eye to form and style, were being slowly but surely restored to their original condition, and the locals were friendly.

After so many months drinking small drafts of wine with finicky Frenchmen, I was looking forward to quaffing foaming pints of ale from England, and I headed for the pub with pleasure. Moreover, I had received a telegram from M. Pinet, in Paris, saying that Quiberon’s destination in France had been changed to Cherbourg; so I could celebrate the possibility of nipping over the Channel to England for a few days before returning to Cresswell in Toulouse.

Entering the Admiral Nelson pub in English Harbour, cool and dim after the tropical glare outside, I found myself in company with an English crew of four in blazers, ties and gold badges, gray flannels, and very posh deck shoes.

“I say! You’re the chappie just up from French Guiana, aren’t, you? Have a good trip, old bean?” The voice that lost the British Empire skewered my ears. His yachting magazine fell into a pool of pink gin.

“Up and down, up and down.” I slugged at a pint.

“Weah going to Americah, you know, in the ketch Dolly Daydream.”

“You should do well up there. They’ll welcome you blokes with open arms!” I took another deep gulp.

“Yes, old chap, and Hamilton heah …” The big, sunburned, fair-haired skipper pointed the stem of his stubby pipe at a smaller replica of himself.” … Hamilton’s orf to Celifawniah, having a go at the old teevee, and films, and all that jolly rot, you know.”

“Should do well. He seems to be the kind of chap they’re lookin’ for.”

I say!” The skipper pointed at my solar plexus with his pipestem. “We had a simply spiffing time coming over from the Canaries, and Neville theah sort of fell in the drink during the night. But we were becalmed, so we didn’t move, don’t you see, and he climbed back onboard.”

He turned to Neville, a long, gawky-looking chap with a permanent bend in his shoulders which made him look as if the berth he slept in was too short. “Weahs Sissie, old boy?” he shouted, holding his gin-and-it in a fist as big as a double-decker bus.

“She’s on her way, Skippah! Just popping some shepherd’s pie in the old oven, you know.” Neville chortled.

“Sissie’s our cook, Tristan. You’ll meet her. Simply spiffing!”

Even as he said it, the doors opened and a short, dumpy figure moved toward us and eventually turned out to be a female. Not one of your everyday, graceful, smiling, charming feminine females. No, this was a genuwyne, beduwyne, hunting’-shootin’-fishin’-sailin’-skiin’-tenissin’-hockeyin’-beer’-drinkin’ English female. Terribly, terribly English, with an accent that would have quelled the Indian Mutiny with her first tortured vowel.

“I say, Skippah old boy, it’s awfly hot onboard,” she screeched. “Wouldn’t it be rahther fun to eat lunch out on the jolly old jetty?”

She had a round face, cheeks like little red crabapples, and ginger, frizzy hair which made her look as if she were in a permanent state of shock, and barbed-wire blue eyes which seemed piercing enough to freeze the hovering flies. She was wearing a blue gym slip, exactly like those worn by school-girls who exercise daily and shout “Oh jolly hockey sticks!” She was about five feet two inches, with arms like a dock worker and little thick legs. The very antithesis of sexuality. Her years—at a wild guess—the mid-forties.

“Hullo, who’s your friend?” she shouted at Neville in a Cheltenham accent as she stared at me and through me.

I introduced myself.

“Pleased to meetcha, old chap! Weah are you bound?”

“Eastward passage. For …” I didn’t finish saying “France.”

“Nowhere near England, is it? I say, I could do with a lift, you know.” She rocked back and forth on her feet.

“No, actually it’s Tangier, Morocco.”

“I say! What a bore! Well, it would have been naice to sail back. What are you doin’ when you get back?” She was finishing pints faster than I.

I nervously replied: “Well, I’m only delivering this one, you see. Then I go back to my boat.”

Skippah chimed in here. “Yes, dahling, this is the chappie from Cresswell, you know.”

“Oh reahlly!” shouted Sissie. “Weah’s your boat?” (The word was out now.)

“Toulouse, but …”

“Oh, my deah ! What fun; I do so love Frawnce!”

“Well, I’m headin’ for Spain when I get back.”

“How terribly, simply divine!” Sissie crushed my arm. “My deah, I simply adore Spain, except for those awful bullfights. The poor beast simply hasn’t an earthly …”

“I think bullfights are great,” I said. (I didn’t; but there was no harm in putting her off, I thought.)

“You simply must let me sail with you. You know in Southchester we’re not on the coast, and my brother Willy—he’s the bishop, you know—gets simply furious when I buzz orf in the jolly old flivver to Chichester or Bosharn or wherevah. And the whole thing’s such an awful bore, darling! When will you sail for Spain?”

“When I get back.”

“Oh, gosh, won’t it be simply adorable fun!” She sighed loudly.

“Yes,” said I, thinking in my mind’s eye of poor old Nelson and the burgoo. Then I invited Sissie, the bishop of Southchester’s sister, to a game of darts. (My ale-fuzzed mind boggled at calling her by her full, tongue-twisting title.) Of course, she beat me all ends up and I had to leave the pub an hour later, before I went broke buying her pints of ale. As I wended my way back to supper onboard, I repeated over and over to myself: Sissie St. John, the bishop of Southchester’s sister.

Through the window of the pub, as I crept back along the gravel path, with the cicadas chirping in the undergrowth and a great tropical moon hanging in the blue-black sky, I heard her high-pitched awfly, terribly up-guards-and-at-’em voice ripping asunder the calm, quiet air of Admiral Nelson’s dockyard, loud enough to make the little one-armed, one-eyed devil-darling of British sailors turn in his grave, all the way over in London.

As I went onboard into the steaming aroma of rice and corned beef, I thought to myself: Thank God Almighty and all the angels in heaven, I managed to put her off sailing with us!