FROM PERLAS TO GALÁPAGOS there are 900 miles of ocean to cross. I had been told in Panama that sailing craft had taken anywhere from seven days to eternity to make it. That was about all the actual information I had.
Even men who had sailed over this vexatious stretch of water couldn’t lay their finger on anything much that could help me. When they talked about it they looked off at the ocean and frowned. “Work into the Galápagos from the east,” they said, “don’t get west of them; you can’t fight back against the trades and the current.”
So that was my plan: work south till I could shape up for the Galápagos by steering into them to westward. Someone said that once I got to the Galápagos, the rest of the voyage to Australia was all “downhill.” The trade winds were the thing. It was the trade winds I was after, and as vexations piled up on themselves I looked toward the trades as a salvation worth fighting to.
To limit the conditions of weather in the area between Panama and the southeast trades to such a simple word as bad or terrible is crass understatement. What makes it bad here is that disturbances are general rather than particular. No type of weather is dominant. Rather, one encounters every conceivable annoyance—not to mention their combination.
I had been in one gale, and a squall in the Perlas. And I had thought them bad at the time. But when I nosed out into Panama Gulf and farther, Pandora’s box threw wide its lid and hell was a-poppin’ from the start.
I didn’t meet any really severe weather conditions—that is, harsh storms. But I should rather have the weather flay me a week at a time, then waft me along for a day of sailing, than do what it did.
Almost every night I was double reefed at the main and hove to. Otherwise I was in a flat calm or in a wind too gentle to enable me to make effective headway against the current. Sandwiched between these three perplexing weather habits was the unpredictable appearance of tropical squalls. Usually their only indication was the whir of wind or the cry of a rent sail.
These waters are undoubtedly the sharpest bone a sailor can have in his throat. Three uncongenial ocean currents meet here and claw at each other under the keel. There is the Mexican current dropping in from the north with its cool flood from Unalaska and the coasts of Japan. Out of the west comes the equatorial countercurrent, torrid and forceful, bringing tropic warmth and tropic life with it. Up from the Antarctic, along the South American coast, flows the cold stream called the Humboldt Current. When these varying waters meet the same thing happens that can only happen when brunette, redhead, and blonde come seeking the same man!
In the midst of these variant upsets an unsteady, one-minute-vicious and one-minute-calm, southwest wind added the final touch of mayhem. For it was to the southwest that I wanted to ply . . . straight into the eye of the wind. So I had to tack; first to south and then to west, fighting the current which was trying to suck me back to Panama—and it was succeeding at times. Some days found me hours on end in nerve-racking calms. Then a gale of wind would prod me in the ribs, causing me to heave to and fall back for most of the night. The morning would find me in a dead calm beneath a deluge of rain and rumbling clouds, or in an electric storm, the sky frightful with lightning.
On the first afternoon out I was in a rising south wind with one reef tucked in and pondering whether I should drop sail and tie in the other, when suddenly the wind dropped away to a void. Great smooth rollers ran under me and away to sternward. In twenty minutes a behemoth of a cloud swept down on me from directly behind. I could hear it talking as it came. By rights I should have doused all sail and gone below. But I was too desperate to make a few feet of southwesting. All day I had beaten to and fro across the same acre of water, into the same forceless head wind. A stern wind was a boon. I held to my hat and sat tight. The squall roared up and very crassly gave me the equivalent of a kick in the pants. In a moment I was flying before it at about seven knots! It was just what I wanted.
Imagine footing it at that clip and plowing head on into the oncoming rollers? Pagan was flying off the top of one into the center of another, a great spray cannonading upward and wetting the rigging to the masthead. Waves of water sluiced along the decks and spilled over the stern. A thump would herald her fall from the back of a smoking wave, and a thud would tell me that she was plowing into the base of another. At one stage I grew a little apprehensive and determined to bring her about and shorten all sail. “Nuts to it, we’re going somewhere,” I called out; and let her fly.
The squall lasted about forty minutes, then fell away to nothing, leaving me in a highly confused sea.
The next day I saw my first tide rip. In a moment—out of nowhere—the sea became an acreage of numberless cone-shaped bouncing wavelets. It rose and fell in an endless dance, licking at the sky with unnumbered fingers. I sat looking at something I had never seen before. It was amazing to see the uncanny epilepsy. It actually jumped aboard, but ran harmlessly out of the self-bailing cockpit. Under the keel two contrary currents had met; and redhead and blonde were tearing out each other’s hair.
Another incident was unique in its way. The day had been one of weak and vacillating ladies’ winds. I had used the engine several hours during the long hot day, in a futile search for a breeze. In midafternoon I gave up and decided to do with what I had. But as night drew on I found myself quite suddenly in a gale—in fact so suddenly as to be unable to pull down sail immediately. By the time the mainsail was reefed and double reefed the storm was down around my ears in earnest. Frothy seas were piling up, and Pagan was pitching savagely. The time had come and gone to hazard the bowsprit and doff the jib.
Staying atop a heaving bowsprit in a gale is like balancing on a rolling barrel. Every time the sprit goes down, you are past your knees in swirling water. About every fourth time, you come up with water in your pockets—your vest pockets!
You cling like grim death to the topmast stay and work at the sail with your free hand. On a dark and stormy night it doesn’t pay to fall off. So you hold tight and work fast—but not too fast. You get careless. That’s what I did!
I had been out on the bowsprit several times in the Perlas and I was approaching the jaunty stage. But sailboats are marvelous devices for impressing the need of constant vigilance. Pagan, in her own inimical way, heeled over, pitched full down and then came up, tossing her bowsprit at the sky. With the grace of a circus clown I floundered end over end into the reaching dark waves.
I fought instantly for the surface. A series of seas clouted me, knocking me sternward somewhere behind the transom. The bumkin was a bare foot out of reach—and I knew I must soon get hold of it, or something, or the next heavy roller, would sweep me down wind. My fiercest swimming was barely enough to enable me to hold my own against Pagan’s slow slog to windward. Sea water was impairing my vision and stifling my breath. In this desperate moment I struck something: at first I thought it the rudder edge, but it was a pair of pants I was dragging astern to wash in the wake. I pulled myself by them up to the rail and clung to it for a moment while I rested.
The sea gave tremendous pulls—impressing me with its unlimited power. In four years of the Merchant Service I had not realized its infinite strength. From the decks of great freighters one is on the seas but not of it. One is cradled between sturdy bulkheads of steel. One just sees the sea. When a merchant seaman gets a salt spray on his lips, it’s an adventure.
As I trailed in Pagan’s spuming wake, too spent to pull myself aboard, I learned the need for some sort of line dragging from the stern, something to grab onto if I fell over again. After I got aboard I went to the bowsprit and wrestled in the jib. But before doing so I lay on the poop, staring soberly at the retreating columns of the sea. Like brutes they ran from under Pagan, growling into the night. It’s natural that I reflected on what could have happened. The danger for the lone sailor is what I had just escaped. I had been lucky. Next time I might not be so lucky. I felt a close part of my boat, an inseparable part of it in the battle with the hungry sea.
I wondered if I would have begun this trip had I known of the actual uncertainties to be facing me, as I was seeing them now. Yes I would, I concluded. What I was doing was fun, it had thrills. Despite the danger, I loved it. There was an appeal that every man feels—the appeal to adventure. And besides, it was taking me to the one girl in the world.
The morning of the fourth day out was like any other, except for one thing. Daylight found me standing east of south, bent slightly before the wind, making laggard time. As usual there was something untoward about the sky—but that was nothing more than I was learning to expect. I had been deep-reefed the night before. To make the most of the day I had risen early and hoisted full sail. But it was useless; the wind was falling steadily off to a calm under a leaden sky.
I cranked up my talkative engine and ran her for two hours before I came upon a light breeze. It was southwest as usual and mild enough to fill my sails but faintly.
During these first five days I was in the process of learning celestial navigation which heretofore I had been too crowded with tasks to get to. While learning the celestial, I figured my daily progress by dead reckoning, using the bubbles rushing off the end of the keel as an indication of my speed through the water. So far I had estimated my gait to be a modest seven knots!—placing me approximately halfway to the Galápagos.
At 10 A.M. I found a new interest.
A great blunt-faced shark was lazing alongside Pagan. He eyed me with tiny pig’s eyes and sidled quickly in to thwack the bilge strakes with his ponderous body.
Seeing and hearing this activity of sharks was an old story to me. Many times in the night or day I have heard them thump the planking. They do it to scratch themselves—or maybe they are vengeful. The first time I ever heard it was when I was sailing in the Perlas. It was night. I was hove-to near Saboga and down below asleep. I was awakened by a sinister thump, which shivered the boat. I bolted to deck thinking it had struck a reef, because I wasn’t sure of my position. My first thought was that I had come about and run back in to shore. But mostly I thought of a reef. On deck I could discern nothing. The air was static and overcast. Pagan was scarcely swaying. For a long time I was perplexed. Then from an oblique angle a silver wake of phosphorus marked the track of an approaching object. At my very feet it banged into the side, scraped eerily a few feet, and slithered away. It was a shark.
I couldn’t have that. Pagan’s planks were only one-inch oak and they were twenty-six years old. Too many back scratchings by hulking sharks and I would be swimming in my bunk. I broke out a spear and when the big shark lumbered in, I reefed it into him. With a startled twist he broke my hold and plunged speedily. Lost: one good spear. After that I tied a bowie knife to an oar—and when they ranged near I gave them a tweak in the ribs with six inches of cold steel.
But to return: the shark which filliped Pagan’s hull that morning of the twenty-third was a whopper. I couldn’t help but marvel at him. He was all shark. He had the swagger of a brute bully; he was half the length of Pagan, and had teeth the size of fingers.
When I saw those staggered twisted teeth I wanted them . . . to show what I had seen. I wanted Mary to see that crushing jawbone, to hold it in her hand.
I brought my heavy sport reel and pole on deck, and attached my largest steel shark hook. I baited it with a fat yellowjack partly gnawed at by Flotsam and Jetsam. When the shark came near I dangled it before him and dragged it away before he could look it over, a simple bit of classroom psychology which, as it whetted him, angered him. Next time he nuzzled it, and arrogantly swept it into his jagged mouth.
I heaved back with all the strength I had. The hook lodged unmistakably in his bold jaw, and with the burn of cold steel he tensed, then, slashing about with a startled suddenness, roiling the water, sent a wave against the planking and made off to beamward.
Threshing in agitation with his slow main strength, he battled away from the boat, making the reel hum. When he ended his run of sixty yards he turned on the hook and flailed the surface, gleaming silvery as he twisted in foam.
I braced myself against the lashed tiller for a ringside view of the most fascinating struggle I had ever seen.
The massive thing tore at the surface of the water, bending violently, from U shape to S shape, champing viciously. Sometimes he appeared astern, then on the bow, always with a smear on the quiet sea. He turned on his back and threshed fitfully, or spun in great full circles abeam and close aboard, followed by his pilot fish.
At one time he was more than a hundred feet down straight under me—so deep in fact I could see nothing in the limpid water. His most spectacular effort came about a half hour after he had been hooked. He had fought the line to its end, dead astern. With dorsal fin cleaving the surface he sped in fury full around the boat, threshing mightily as he went. Spray shot above him and a long wake rolled away behind him. He ended his circular run, paused a second, then sped fifty feet toward the quarter, swirled about, and raced away as though he would wrench his head off with the impending shock at the line’s end. Barely before he reached the line’s end he thrust himself from the water, and twisting on his back he sent a shiver from head to tail that, had the line grown taut—even if it were boltrope—would have snapped it like spaghetti. After that his defiance fell completely away. He struggled only pettily as I towed him to the rail.
The teeth I saw were unbelievable. They lay in two uneven rows, each two inches long and thicker than a pencil. They jutted at rakish angles, looked unmercifully sharp, and were wielded by a jaw mammoth enough to crush bone. My envy of his power, coupled with the animal instincts of the victor, induced me to lean over the rail and punch him in the nose. I found it about as hard as Pagan’s decks.
The great jaw, the jagged teeth—they were fascinating. But how to get them? My wicked intuition that all was well prodded me. Pull him aboard; cut his head off; boil the flesh away—it’s simple.
Flotsam and Jetsam, with paws on the rail, could smell the fishy stench of the beast’s breath and were fidgeting and mewing eagerly for a feast. I decided to pull him aboard.
First, I naïvely tried to lift him by direct pull, but only budged him scantily. He weighed hundreds of pounds. I fastened the main halyard to the gaff hook fitted in his gill and with desperate heaves dragged him an inch at a time over the transom, into the cockpit. What a monster. His head lay in the cockpit and his tail hung over the stern. He stirred faintly. I took the hatchet and buried it in his spine to end his tremors. A spurt of blood sprayed over me.
At the same moment the big body quivered violently. Flotsam and Jetsam went racing to the bow. I watched them. I heard a resounding scuffle and saw my tiller, splintered loose at the rudderpost, go flying into the sea.
All hell broke loose around me. The great shark came completely to life, threw himself in wild assault. With great sweeps of his tail and butts of his head he swept my legs from under me, almost knocking me overboard.
The great tail was pounding up and down like a sledgehammer, splintering, slamming, erasing. The gas-tank hatch disintegrated in a flash and the brazed copper tank went flat, spilling its load into the bilge. I clung to the rail, horrorstricken. The cockpit coaming rumbled, shattered, and flew at me, and if I hadn’t ducked it would have gone down my throat.
In the meantime the hatchway sliding door had been popped through to the cabin floor and the rear porthole cracked. The bottom of the cockpit was giving way. Pagan was bouncing as though pounded by great fist blows.
I darted as close as I dared, grabbed up my hatchet, and chopped away at the heaving spine. Again he set to beating with sinuous motions. The partition between the engine compartment and cockpit screamed and split away. The cockpit deck itself broke through, the gasoline drums rumbled into the engine compartment, and the shark lay head down on the motor. I jumped in and struck again, burying the blade, and burying it again.
The destruction went on.
Pagan was being blasted apart before my eyes. I hacked with the hatchet like a wild woodcutter. I opened gashes in the head, and in the back. I had chopped his dorsal fin half away. Still he mauled my boat. I was afraid he would work his way into the cabin and rip it down or endanger the mast. I struck the harder. I went after him like a madman—blood bespattered and desperate.
He mangled the engine with side movements of his head, bending the sparkplugs down and tearing the wiring away. He fell beside the motor, threw himself around athwart-ships, and lying on the propeller shaft throbbed till it bent out of line. I was terrified lest he should work his way against the ribbing and smash the hull open. I lay on my side atop the engine, eased close, and notched a great hole in his stomach and lower jaw.
He jumped spasmodically. I moved after him, lost in the bloody, death-dealing strokes. I cut his eye completely out and opened a hole from his gill to his shorn dorsal fin; still he lashed like a whip.
I sidled closer, drawing my legs up so that I could fit into the confined space, and turned more on my side to apply all my strength. Aiming for his nose—a supposed Achilles’ heel—I laid it open bone and all, as far back as his front teeth. Still he throbbed dangerously. Moving closer—inches from him—I hacked into his vital stomach organs.
I was so far gone I was hardly nicking him. But it suddenly didn’t matter; he gaped at the mouth and lay still. I lay for a long time beside him, watching him, hoping he wouldn’t move, because if he had, I would have been in his way and too tired to shift. Everything about me was either smashed or coated red. I was caked with blood.
Before I could consider getting the battered carcass over the side, I had a few jobs to do. I had to pump gallons of gasoline, battery acid, and clotted blood from the bilges. Then I washed the gore from the decks, cabin, planking, and ribbing inside. After that I cleared away the splintered and broken lumber, piling it in the cabin.
The cockpit was a gaping hole. In the midst of it, the kittens were growling hungrily over the shark; chewing tastily with the corners of their mouths. I cut them a sizable meal and placed them with it on the fore scuttle.
Cutting into the shark’s stomach, I found a motley of tragic creatures which had wholly or partly contributed themselves to his meals: two whole squid, a large Spanish mackerel, a mass of predigested small fry, the yellowjack I had baited him with, and several chunks of flesh and bone torn evidently from a very large fish.
After such a contest to subdue the shark, I considered his jawbone more a prize than ever. I cut his head off and later cleaned and scraped the bones and yellow teeth—a gruesome sight.
To heave the carcass over the side I had to cut it into two pieces and tussle with it by main strength. As to the wreckage—most of my spare time for the next two weeks was spent in rebuilding the stern.
Because of the shark I added another moral to my list: don’t haul sharks aboard!
The engine was useless unless I turned back to Panama to have it repaired. As I look back now, I realize I should have turned back and put in at the Mechanical Division in Balboa for the work. In the long run I would have saved time. Too, I probably would have had a much hastier and most uneventful and dull trip across the Pacific.
The principal reason I didn’t do an about-face was the state of my exchequer—it was low; only twenty-five dollars. And that wouldn’t pay the docking fee. Also, my navigation by dead reckoning indicated I was making from eighty to a hundred miles a day. I expected to be in the Galápagos in a week—once there I wouldn’t need an engine. The southeast trade winds, I was told, begin there, and with their power and constancy motor power is unneedful.
So I bore on, strictly under sail.