MY BOAT was in her trim, and rearing to be off on her long, ill-fated voyage. A voyage from Panama to Australia—8500 miles of variable seas, reefs, and tropic islands—across the equator, through the doldrums, and into the hurricane seas . . . singlehanded. A voyage of uncertainty, but what could I do? I had been pushed into it by a sequence of compelling events over which I had no control.
I had to go, or so I thought. And I had to do it on the little sailing cutter I had bought two weeks before at Balboa, Panama. In no other way could I get to my Australian bride whom I had married a year before in Sydney.
It was May, 1946; the war had just ended. Ships were scarce and on chaotic schedules. I was stranded. Mary—my bride—was stranded also. She waited in Sydney, waited helplessly for the ship that never sailed: for that matter, for her, wasn’t due to sail for another year. There just wasn’t enough shipping; it was as simple as that.
I had tried everything to get a ship back to my bride, but everything had failed. I had been half around the world since marrying her, had been full across America, and finally wound up in Panama, and still no ship, so I bought the small boat.
When I first saw my boat, Pagan, she was nuzzling to a buoy at the Balboa Yacht Club, in the Canal Zone. In a word, she was trim—that is, she was built to sail. From forward of the stemhead to abaft the stempost, she tallied a hair short of twenty-six feet on the water line, and twenty-nine feet on her decks. She ran ten feet at her widest beam, and three feet ten inches at her deepest draft. She lay afloat with a yeomanly air: bow up like a snob, her forty-foot stick raking back and up. She was like a canoe, lying low to the water as she did, stirring sensitively to every change on the surface.
Her cabin, about eight feet long, situated between the mast and cockpit, stood eighteen inches above the rail; other than that her decks showed nothing but her standing and running rigging. For her twenty-nine feet she was clean and spacious.
She had an offset bowsprit which ran seven feet out from the foredeck. This balanced her against her lofty mast, and gave proportion to her long boom that stuck past the stern. She was Marconi rigged, and double ended for ease in a seaway.
Pagan, in her lines and carriage, had the look and air of a sailor that not even a landlubber could fail to interpret.
Though I knew little of yachts—I had only visited aboard one small sailboat in my life—I liked her. I was willing to risk the voyage to Australia with her.
She had been under my hand for two weeks. She was stowed with the necessaries for a long sea cruise, her rigging was in order, there was no reason not to be gone. I, too, after my long month of inaction around Panama, was eager to cast off, and give her her head abroad on the sea. The sooner I sailed, I figured, the sooner would I be with Mary.
I knew little of the intricacies of maneuvering a boat under sail. But somewhere was the ultimate of faith that all would come right in its time. The important thing was to be off on the long trip—to be out on the sea, with the sails filling, the prow seeking the southwest, and water hurrying under the keel, bubbling in the wake.
Such a trip would never have concerned me but that I longed to see my bride again. However, I must admit, as sailing time neared I was gripped more and more with a fever for what was ahead. The adventure of it drew me on like a magnet. In three years of sailing on heavy freighters and oilers in the Merchant Marine, I had never been so taken with the romance of a sea voyage. Suddenly I was rapt in the prospect: my own boat to command at my own will on the southern seas.
I stood gazing out along the main road of the channel, to the open, seemingly level water. Unknown to me then were the perils to come out there in the next six months. I couldn’t know the ominous twists the cruise was to take. I could only be impatient to be on my way to my wife. I was keen to close the widened distance between us, even if I had to do it on the little boat.
To do so was to take a course of least resistance and most happiness to myself, that is all. To accept the other alternative and give up the sailboat idea was to continue the forced separation from Mary of the past year.
I have always had a quiet yearning for far places. When America entered the war I had hoped to travel extensively while serving with some branch of the American armed forces, preferably the Army Air Corps. But because of a perforated eardrum I was rejected. I turned seaman and took work as a deck hand in the U.S. Merchant Marine.
After two years on the sea, and twice around the world on ships of foreign as well as American service, I tired of stuffy, blacked-out quarters and the boundless swagger of maritime gold braid. I deserted a Swedish merchantman in Sydney in January 1944 and joined the Royal Australian Air Force. During my year of service in the RAAF I trained in Brisbane, Dubbo (in the interior of New South Wales), Sydney, and Canberra. It was there I met Mary.
At the end of my second month in the Australian Capital Territory it happened. I somehow committed a minor infraction of Air Force Rules, and I was placed on C.B.—confined to barracks for seven days. During this week I was given a number of humiliating tasks such as mopping out the front offices, and so on. The officer who directed my work was a WAAAF; blue-eyed, attractive, pleasant to take orders from.
We announced our engagement shortly thereafter. In a week my flight was posted to Sydney, where, in February 1945, I was “demobbed” in conformity with Air Force demobilization.
The American War Shipping Administration contacted me, hoping I would apply as an able seaman to fill shortages on U.S. merchant ships. Actually, I had wanted to enter Sydney University and recommence my education, broken off by the war three years before at Santa Barbara State College, in California. I was eligible for Australia’s Rehabilitation Program. But the need for seamen was more pressing. The war was still on.
Mary encouraged me to join up with the Merchant Marine and though she had already served three years in the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force, she intended to continue service so long as her country needed her.
The day following my discharge, I went aboard an American Liberty ship and signed on as able seaman.
The stubby, rusted freighter, shrouded in wartime gray, put into Townsville in the north, then touched at four ports in the Solomons. She hit at the New Hebrides, made the three main calls of the New Guinea north coast and discharged her final tonnage at Biak and Morotai. She returned to New Guinea for a company of Aussie “diggers,” and transshipped them to Borneo. There we received orders to tramp to Brisbane for another consignment of Aussie troops.
When we hailed into Brisbane I had been gone from Mary nearly four months. It was May. In America May is the month of spring; in Australia it is the depth of winter. But love knows no season.
We were married in Sydney, then flew to Brisbane to honeymoon for three days before my ship sailed on a Sunday afternoon.
The makeshift transport was taking more troops to Borneo and would be back in six weeks. It was to be a steady schedule till the end of the war.
Our farewells weren’t burdened by the heavy fact of what actually lay ahead for us. We kissed thinking we would be together every six weeks till the war’s end; then forever.
The fat Liberty ship wallowed up through the Great Barrier Reef, around the tip of eastern Papua, and began the long haul for Borneo. Somewhere off Madang, in the black of brewing weather, a sudden cyclone swooped upon the overcrowded vessel and battered her ceaselessly. The whole night she was twisted, lumbering much of the time out of control, being pushed at will by boiling sea mountains and high winds. At a few moments before daylight—less than a week out of Brisbane—she rammed herself full speed and bow-on into solid land, just west of the little tropic port of Finschhafen.
Her bow stood fifty feet into the New Guinea jungle; trees overhung us as far back as number two hatch. The diggers were lowered over the side to form a cordon around the bow, in case we were in Jap territory.
The crew turned to, to save the frowzy ship. Her anchors were dumped into the jungle, the cargo from the forward holds was heaved by the board as jetsam. Towing cables were led aft and veered out to waiting tugs. Gear was piled on the fantail and in the gun tubs to press the stern down so the bow could be worked from its coral grip.
After five days, with three tugs straining and engines full astern, she shook free and limped into Langemak, sister port to Finschhafen, her bows awash. The damage was surveyed and her gaping holes temporarily plugged with cement.
We started her thus for Frisco.
The third night out, the mate on watch sighted what he thought was a beach over the bows. But it was the wake of a PT boat. He threw all machinery in reverse and the terrific shaking of speedily changed engines shivered her as though she were rammed. The cement in the bilges cracked and re-cracked, dropping through the bottom. Bow awash, she put about for Manus, in the Admiralty Islands.
For thirty days the U.S. Navy fetched and carried for the naked gray carcass as she lay shored up in dry dock. Despite the attentions she received, it was almost beyond her to trudge across the Pacific to her interment in an American bone yard.
When I tramped down her gangway for the last time, I took a job stevedoring around the San Pedro waterfront. By stevedoring I kept my finger on the pulse of shipping. In a fortnight I contacted a tanker bound for Melbourne, and signed aboard as able seaman. That night I was on my way to Mary.
Two weeks fell away. It was August. The war had just ended, and the crew hummed gaily at its work as it toyed with the prospect of living in a world at peace. For many of us this suddenly became our last trip. We were off Samoa, a week out of Port Phillip. Another week and I would be with Mary. It was hard to believe that after three and a half months we would soon be strolling Melbourne’s familiar Flinders Street together.
The very night I relished these thoughts, the great wallowing tanker was diverted from her destination by an urgent change of orders to proceed to Manila with our oil.
Two weeks in Manila and we sailed, ostensibly for Texas City via Panama. At Panama we were directed, instead, to Aruba in the Dutch West Indies. We berthed at Orangestadt, like a piglet to a bloated sow, and sucked 125,000 barrels of black oil from the smoking, smelling refineries. As directed, we reported at Honolulu and hence to Yokohama.
There two weeks, a week in Nagoya, eight days in Yokosuka, and we were shoving off for Shanghai. Nine days we swung at the hook on the scurrying Hwang-pu watching the tumbled sampans and junks; then steamed down wind to the muddy Yangtze Kiang and thence into the China seas. Twenty-eight days later we fetched up in Panama, 10,000 miles across the Pacific.
A few days in Panama, and the big black-hulled tanker was on the track for Curaçao, sister island to Aruba. From there we made across the Atlantic and into Bristol Channel, docking at Avonmouth, England.
In two weeks, the first of April, 1946, I landed in New York City. My first thought, after signing off the tanker, was to find a ship back to Mary. I started a thorough search of the waterfront—immediately.
The shipping companies had nothing, passenger or work-a-way. The Red Cross listened to my predicament and offered all assistance, but they could find no transportation. The United Seamen’s Service interceded on my behalf with their every agency; but to no avail. The hands of the Maritime Unions were tied; only a few ships were plying to Australia; and all of them were out and not expected back for months. “Try Frisco,” they suggested.
I hit the road to the West Coast, hitchhiking. I thumbed my way, because, first of all, I could beat the bus or train; and secondly, by so doing I could afford to pay my fare to Australia more readily. I had with me nearly sixteen hundred dollars, roughly half my pay-off from the tanker. The remainder of the money I had banked.
The story from shipping sources around the Frisco waterfront was much the same series of doubts and speculations as I had found in New York.
Four days later I was shouldering my sea bag down populous Canal Street in New Orleans, with the dust of six states in my hair. Once again I started the search for an Australian-bound ship. For two days I tramped the rounds of shipping offices and seamen’s unions on the river front. The best I could do was procure a banana boat for Panama as passenger, in two months, provided I could get a visa!
Finally, I caught a pierhead jump as scullion on a troop ship bound for Panama via Puerto Rico. In the Canal Zone, I packed my gear, and in the wee hours of the morning sneaked it through the tight customs guard thrown around the wharves. My purpose in coming to Panama was to catch a British steamer in transit for Australia; or in fact anywhere in Australasia from whence I could make for Sydney.
This scheme fell through miserably. Shipping was dead. I asked along the wharves from Cristobal to Balboa, but found no flicker of encouragement. In the end I was caught stowing away on a Dutchman bound for Indonesia. It was pure bad luck I was caught. The ship was steaming out the main channel and the whistle suddenly clogged. When the engineer came up to the funnel to repair it, he ran unexpectedly into me, crouched as I was just inside the tall, dark shell. He flashed his light on the loaf of bread and bottle of water under my arm—an uncommon sight on a passenger-less ship.
I was put over the side with the pilot and hauled before the stony immigration authorities. There was no interest in my plight. Nobody cared about my problems. I was hustled into the compound to await exportation as a crewman on the next undermanned vessel to pass through the Canal.
It was in the clink that I met George. George was an Aussie and, like many men one runs across in out-of-the-way places, he was desperate. He burned with a desire to get home. He had missed an Australian ship in Scotland and, unable to pass the physical requirements for the British Merchant Navy, he had no means of working his way back home. He was broke, so he had stowed away on a British tramp.
He also was caught and when the freighter arrived in Panama he was turned over to the Canal authorities and stowed away in the compound. When I met him he was soon to be returned to England to stand trial as a stowaway.
George and I were desperate men. We racked our brains that first day to unearth some means of escaping our predicament. I was to be placed aboard the first ship to loom up short of crew. The chance of that ship’s going to Australia, or remotely near, was flimsy; it was more than flimsy—it was nonexistent. I could picture myself pushed aboard some rusty scow outbound from Panama to any odd corner of the world.
When George suggested we get a small boat and “sail the bloody thing across,” I fell in with the idea; and in no time we were making wild plans. I knew of a small boat for sale at Balboa, having heard of it on the Wind’s Will—Kim Powell’s yacht, which I had come upon when stalking the waterfront. Kim, a veteran of Caribbean and Isthmian waters, and a sailor of judgment, said he liked the boat; that was enough for me. I told George about it and we decided to buy it.
That night, we scaled the back fence of the compound and found the owner of the craft. The boat was on the block for a thousand dollars. The owner was keen on a sale, but had compunctions about passing it off for such a harebrained escapade. I elbowed George and explained that I had sailed out to Honolulu on racing boats and “all up and down the California coast.”
I explained that George had battled across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand as navigator and mate on a ketch. After higgling till two in the morning we came away glowing inwardly and outwardly, the owners of a boat.
The next morning I announced to the authorities that I was a yachtsman—that my craft was anchored at the Balboa Yacht Club, and that I must get back aboard. In due time, I told them, I could produce papers and show reasons and funds sufficient to warrant sailing out on my own to my wife. They dissented at first, and then, when they saw I was determined, agreed to free me if and when they could verify the facts. In the meantime, I was to languish in the compound.
George and I planned that I would go out and ready the boat—which as yet we hadn’t seen—for sea, then at the last minute he would come aboard, and off we would go. That night we went over the fence to have the first look at our craft.
At the Yacht Club a small shadow in the dark, near the pier, was pointed out as the Pagan. We rowed to her and flashed our lights over her decks, and into her rigging, and down below. Twenty-nine feet never looked so short before, and it seemed to strike George the same way. In fact, when we had been aboard awhile and had become more acquainted with her limitations, he talked less about the boat and more about his coming trial in England. He hoped the sentence for stowaways wasn’t too severe. I didn’t embarrass George by asking him, when we went back that night, if he intended to go with me.
The next day the Immigration Authorities rather hesitantly gave me the nod.
By then I was in the newspapers. People came and stood on the pier watching me at work, and they always shook their head when they discussed Pagan. But I was oblivious of their comments. I owned a boat; it was mine, I was too busy working on her getting her ready to sail.
I noised it about the waterfront that I wanted someone to go with me, particularly someone who could navigate, because I knew little of navigation; but toward the last I didn’t care who came along—anyone would do. There were three bidders.
The first was Jim, a discharged Marine. He too had married overseas. His bride was in Melbourne, and he hadn’t seen her in seventeen months. There was no transport for her to come across in. His search for a ship, like mine, had broken down. He was seriously planning to fit out a lifeboat and set out on his own. Then he heard of me.
I met him, as arranged by phone, in a bar in Balboa. He, like me, hadn’t sailed before, but, as he put it, “There’s nothing two Americans can’t do. What one won’t think of, the other one will.”
Jim couldn’t wait to see Pagan, so I suggested we go out.
I should have kept my big mouth shut and taken him aboard just before sailing time. He thought I was kidding when I pointed out Pagan—he was looking at the fifty-footer anchored near by.
Finding no “kitchen” and no “bathroom” he chewed his lip and looked blank. When Jim left that night, I didn’t expect him back, and he didn’t come.
I didn’t learn the name of the second applicant; he didn’t stay long enough. He said he was looking for “adventure,” but it was the kind he was used to enjoying as an officer in the Merchant Marine. I haven’t seen a Junior Third Mate yet with less gold braid than the captain of the Queen Mary. And this one was no exception. He was lavish in praise of the fifty-footer and wondered when we would be getting under way. I told him my boat was the twenty-nine-footer on the other side, and we would sail as soon as he got his gear aboard.
What he couldn’t understand is that a twenty-nine-footer is roughly only twice as wide—at her beamiest part—as an ordinary bed, and just a little more than four times as long. Not much room for “adventure.”
The third bidder was twins, and they wanted to sign on to do no work at all, just loaf and enjoy the South Seas. I signed them on at sight, and I couldn’t have made a better choice short of a round-the-Horn windjammer captain. The twins were kittens, castaways from a near-by machine shop. They had a way about them that took all the burden out of setbacks and disappointments when they came. They were better than a crew.
I was hoping the write-up in the Panamanian paper would attract a sailor of experience, or even one without. All I wanted was a companion. Whether he was black, white, red, or green didn’t matter. However, regarding the latter, I didn’t want him so green he would want to turn back the first day out. When, by May 24—two weeks after I had bought Pagan—no callers came, I loaded the last stores, cleared away the decks, and watched for a seemly change in the weather. Time was skidding on. Out on the Pacific, skies were smiling on the sea, and would do so till October, when the hurricanes prowled. I had four months to outrace the hurricane season to the Tasman Sea and Australia; sufficient time for an easy passage, if I could get under way quickly.
I shook hands around the waterfront. Last minute comforts of books, magazines, food, cooking utensils, and crockery were piled on the wharf for me by well-wishing Isthmians.
When I stepped down the companionway for an early night, the air was clear, the night was clean, and a fresh wind was in the south.