THE MORNING OF JULY 8 I came on deck as usual, threw my eyes into the rigging to check on things, then gazed around the horizon at the sea. There was a fresh wind up. Off to starboard was something that made me look again. It was a dense curtain of cloudlike air, arm-shaped and bent, reaching from the sea into the clouds, and marching over the water. It was a tropic waterspout.
How many waterspouts I had seen in the Merchant Marine! How many times had I leaned on the rail peering wistfully into their mystery and wishing I was captain! And now I was captain: and I did what I always said I would do, if I saw a waterspout from my own boat. I loosed the lashings from the tiller and set Pagan on a track that put her straight for the center of the waterspout.
I have heard a lot about waterspouts during my time on the ships. Some have said they suck solid water into the clouds, and to put a ship through their center is to take it into a waterfall. Others have said they have hurricane winds inside. And others have said they mother a great whirlpool at their funnel-like base that can suck a ship under.
I have studied dozens of waterspouts from the rails of ships and I have always held that they were harmless. I have argued again and again that they are only large short-lived whirlwinds. And now I was going to test my arguments. I tossed Flotsam and Jetsam below, dogged the ports, and slid the companion hatch shut.
Pagan was deep reefed at the main from high winds of the night before. She crept in upon the towering dark wall of whining air. I lashed the tiller down and raced to the bow for a closer look, to see if it might not be wiser to change my mind about going on. Then suddenly the spout shifted and headed directly for Pagan. I ran to the mast and clung to it. Pagan was swallowed by a cold wet fog and whirring wind. The decks tilted. A volley of spray swept across the decks. The rigging howled. Suddenly it was dark as night. My hair whipped my eyes, I breathed wet air, and the hard cold wind wet me through. Pagan’s gunwales were under and she pitched into the choppy seaway.
There was no solid trunk of water being sucked from the sea; no hurricane winds to blow down sails and masts; and no whirlpool to gulp me out of sight. Instead, I had sailed into a high dark column from 75 to 100 feet wide, inside of which was a damp circular wind of 30 knots, if it was that strong.
As suddenly as I had entered the waterspout I rode out into bright free air. The high dark wall of singing wind ran away. For me another mystery of the sea was solved. I shook out the reef in the mainsail, hoisted all sail, and went below to write my adventure into the log.
The next night I was hove-to—riding at sea anchor. I was slumbering peacefully: Pagan was dogged down tight. She had a terrific roll on, and not a stitch of sail up.
Unknown to me, my ten-gallon water breaker, secured into the starboard bilge, had chafed away its lashings. Suddenly it lurched from its position. It bounded to the floor, followed through on top of me, then careened into the port ribbing. Before I could arise, it bounded back and knocked me with it to the floor. Several times it used me battering-ram style. It jumped and rolled like something alive; there was no holding it. My weight was as nothing before it. When I rose to scramble away, it caught me at the ankles, toppling me under it, and proceeded to roll over me. I jerked my mattress from the bunk and thrust it between us. With my pillow and blankets and a life preserver I wedged it in, and trapped it between me and the bunk side. It’s a wonder it hadn’t broken some bones or wrenched a few joints, or for that matter it’s a marvel it hadn’t done extensive damage to my boat.
What had happened to the cats, I didn’t know. Presently I heard their just complaints. They were part of the wedging material—certainly a job their harsh contract hadn’t included. At expense to my bruised elbows and knees, I freed them, and relashed my cask.
But I wasn’t the only one aboard to be severely treated by the sea’s caprice. One noontime the cats and I were enjoying the midday sun. I was lolling in the cockpit and Flotsam and Jetsam were flouncing about the cabin top. They were playing cat’s games on a box I was intending to paint when it dried. The wind, from southwest, was weak and unsteady, except that every now and then it bent us over gustily.
A gust of wind hit us of a sudden, knocked us out of plumb and pitched the box to the deck, bouncing the cats off the rail into the clutching sea. At first I wanted to pitch in after them and return via the life line. But the likelihood of getting both of them, or even one, was remote. I heaved my life jacket near them to mark the spot, and hastened to put Pagan about. Every foot I moved from the spot where they fell over was crucial. An object on the surface of the sea is well hidden at twenty-five yards. Once a seaman fell from a ship I was on. A life ring was thrown him. He was seen to grab it. By the time the ship turned about he had disappeared among the crests. Two hours we searched, in two lifeboats, with powerful binoculars. We never saw man or life buoy.
I had this in mind as I slashed the ropes on the tiller, put her helm hard aweather, and threw off the jib sheet. As she jibed around, the sheet rings screeched across the travelers and the whole boat jumped under the blow. I sheeted the jib home, eased off the main, and bore down on the spot as I remembered it.
I ran for what seemed an unconscionably long time. Seeing nothing, I thought it meet to turn back and zigzag the area.
I brought her up into the wind and dropped her over to the starboard tack, on a reach. Standing on the cabin, gripping the mast with one hand and the glasses with the other, I scanned every drop of water. At a suitable moment I came about on the port tack and searched the crests both up and down wind. Nothing. I was lapsing into despair. Those poor little scamps, floating on an unfriendly, lonesome sea. And if they were seen, who would bother about cats?
The searchings I made on the billowy sea had a depth of compassion behind them. I made two more long tacks, covering a wide range, but the hiding sea wouldn’t give them up. Hours must have passed. With last looks over the curling waters I turned to my former course. Suddenly my life jacket heaved into view aport. I felt sure I could find the cats now if they hadn’t drowned, or swum too far from the preserver.
When the yellow life jacket came in view again it was practically dead ahead. But there were no cats near it. I searched the immediate water with my glasses and saw nothing. I scrutinized the top of each sea, jerking the glasses here and there to examine each unfamiliar splash. Only the impersonal sea, but no unfortunate kittens struggling on the surface. In a moment I saw why. As the jacket appeared, there they sat, atop it, blending into its unruly surface, and wailing as only lostlings can wail.
The looks they gave me, as I scooped them in, were ample clarification that they were wholeheartedly grateful. Three hours on that pulsating frothy floor had left them wringing wet and bedraggled, shivering helplessly. This, to them, at least for the moment, was the last straw.
I took them below to dry off and sleep safely in warm wool blankets.
Soon after this, one of the large variety of sea birds landed aboard Pagan—probably a gannet. He took a position on the cabin and regarded me airily when I came near to be friends. The first time I picked him up he vomited a mass of tiny, partly digested fish on me and jabbed at me with his long, dull bill.
Later, we became firm pals, when, after discovering he was ridden with lice, I dusted his feathers with some of the kittens’ flea powder. And when I took him out of the heavy weather at night, and perched him on the handle of the tool kit in the peaceful cabin, he became my outspoken buddy. Whenever I came near him on deck thereafter he would squawk raucously—evincing his happiness at being a part of the crew—fan the air with his long wings, and nestle contentedly under my petting.
Each day he flew off a few hours to feed, but finally gave up the struggle for existence when I included him with Flotsam and Jetsam each morning in apportioning the fish I caught. But the new passenger hated the kittens. The first time they met was at a fish feed. A knock-down drag-out brawl was the result, with Flotsam and Jetsam taking a drubbing. I came out when I heard the scuffling. The kittens were spitting and arching. The sea bird was attacking them in turn, flailing them with his wings and pecking circles around them.
Thereafter I had to keep them separated.
I named him Gawky, because he was a living monument to the word. I got the idea when he toppled off the boom onto the cabin and bounced over the side when I playfully sneezed in his face.
So Gawky took his place as a boarder “on the house” along with the cats and my school of dolphin. The leader of the dolphin, a battle-scarred old veteran of thousands of successful contests with lesser and greater fry than he, I named Old Death. He didn’t forage out ahead as the others did—he stayed in close, lazing under the shadow of the hull, darting out with murderous speed on unsuspecting victims, making his kills within a boat length of the keel.
One morning I saw an unbelievable thing aboard Pagan. I had been splicing a jibsheet fair-lead at the fish plates. Upon finishing it, I started below. And there, beside my bunk, under the chart rack, in startled quiet, was a large gray rat.
He was longer than either of the cats. His eyes, like tiny black agates, were fixed on me; his whiskers wigwagged nervously. Beside him a thick hairless tail formed a thin gray wake, showing where he had turned as I startled him. He made a motion to go, and I grabbed and tossed the first thing my blind hand touched—my alarm clock. Glass and spare parts flew around the tiny cabin.
I was sorry I had startled and threatened the poor devil—“Live and let live,” I thought. I figured he would be a welcome part of the crew, along with Flotsam and Jetsam and Gawky. Out here on the high seas, in a tiny bobbing world, what mattered it who was aboard.
It was an amazing thing—this rat aboard—when I sat down to think it out. How and when had he come aboard? How in all these weeks, in so small a space, had we avoided each other? Not a sign of him had I seen. What about the kittens—why hadn’t they detected him? Where had he gotten his food and his water?
I jerked bolt upright at the thought of the latter. Had he gnawed into my water breakers? I checked instantly each of my oaken casks, turning them around, searching their whole area. No sign of tampering.
I searched into my food stores beneath the cabin bunks, in the lockers; and found droppings he had left behind, which I hadn’t seen before. There was no possibility of his eating into the tins or the jars or jugs. Then, as I crawled under the forepeak, and rummaged in the starboard bunk, I found where all these weeks he had secreted himself.
In Panama I had stored a few items in a lemon crate, tacked it over with canvas, and painted the covering. It was into this he had gnawed in search of the cheese, salt pork, and prunes inside. As to his source of water, I can only assume he licked up my spillings during mealtime, or he licked up the overspillings from the milk cans.
One thing I quickly learned—the kittens knew of his presence. When I brought them down, they went directly into the forepeak to stand a patient vigil at the small opening they couldn’t get into. In the weeks since leaving the Perlas, I had been too busy working my boat to see the grim drama below decks.
Stowaway, so far as I can conjecture, must have come aboard when I ran aground at San José. Just possibly he had crept from the jungle into my supplies on the beach and had somehow become trapped in the gear as I reloaded it.
Judging from what is told of the sea from old, of rats not boarding an unsound ship, I was flattered by the compliment of his presence. So Stowaway, as I named him, became a part of the cruise—another mouth to feed in my little Pacific household.
Each night I placed a morsel of food and a thimbleful of water at the base of the mast for Stowaway. I wanted him to be fed and watered, so that he wouldn’t be up to such rat’s pranks as gnawing into my water breakers. In my spare time I sawed up and hammered together a small shelter, somewhat like a bird house. I lashed it to the mast at the floor, with the door directed forward so that our diffident passenger could come and go in secret. Though he rarely made a public appearance, he never failed to draw his rations.
He evidently felt at one with his abode because several times I caught the cats snooping around it. They had that eager look which usually possessed them when I flashed a fish under their noses.
They had many a struggle at its front door, a small round hole. It was easily large enough for Stowaway, but Flotsam and Jetsam could get only their eyes in. What a tantalizing place for them that box became. I can still see them there, each with a fierce paw clawing through the opening, laboring like tiny lions and voicing mightily their ego and thwarted desire.
Since Flotsam and Jetsam were confirmed seamen and adapted to a regimen of fresh fish, I was surprised they would concern themselves over a mere rodent. But despite the salt in their blood, they stalked Stowaway in a fashion to do a landlubber justice.
And so life went . . . a succession of simple events to detract from the bane of tortuous miles. The plainest things were of the greatest interest.
Many have asked me if I was bored out there in a wooden world whose length was that of most kitchens and the width of most bathrooms. Life is never boring to me, never was, no matter where I have been. My early life was such that I was forced upon myself, when I wasn’t working. I learned early to fill those hours with my own diversion.
Aboard Pagan I found plenty to do, even at the most static times. My main preoccupation—aside from working my boat, which took overwhelmingly of my time—was with reading. I had a varied library aboard, everything from “who dunnits” to Darwin. And I read all. Now a mystery, now a novel, now politics, now philosophy, and now poetry. The ones I liked were De Maupassant’s Short Stories, Carey McWilliams’s Brothers Under the Skin; Harold Laski’s Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, and Will Durant’s The Mansions of Philosophy.
Another thing I did, I spent time thinking. Often I sat for hours gazing out across the water to the sea rim, chewing mentally at whatever wished to ease into my mind.
Often my thoughts turned on my past life, and I relived completely all that had gone before. The oldest of five sons and a daughter. The loss of my father at fifteen . . . during the depression. Four years of work helping my mother support the family. Factories, mills, and sweatshops—for a boy who wanted to go to school.
Remarriage of my mother to a kindly stepfather. For me, freedom from the yoke of a large family. All I earned, my own now. But I didn’t want to earn: I wanted to learn; to rise above the factory. So off I went—broke, with a ninth grade education—to college. I had no alternative. Who, at twenty, after working four years in the “open” shops of Los Angeles’s south end, wants to go back to high school . . . with the kids?
Santa Barbara State College: I begged my way in and they let me stay. I borrowed money from the Dean of Men—a swell guy. I worked my way through. Played football. Class prexy in my sophomore year. What should have been my junior year was spent on merchant ships. I wanted to fly a bomber but I had a hole in my eardrum from childhood T.B.—4F in the draft; no service would have me but the Merchant Marine.
Two years in the Merchant Marine. Twice around the world. From Reykjavik to Cape Horn. A year in the Royal Australian Air Force. Marriage—to a blue-eyed Aussie girl, the greatest event in my life. Again in the Merchant Marine, this time more than a year. The war over, Mary and I caught in the shuffle, separated by circumstances.
And now, bobbing on a splinter of wood uncertainly across the Pacific.
Some of the time I worked ship—depending, of course, on the weather. Each morning I trolled for fish. I navigated. If the cats were in a playful mood, we sported about the decks awhile. Or I had a long talk and a genial boxing match with Gawky. Many hours I watched Old Death and his boys slipping through the sea attacking the flying fish. A few hours a day I read.
Of principal importance was a letter I was writing Mary, to be mailed at Seymour Island. I added a few lines each day to it. It grew as my dreams and desires to be with her grew.
At times Mary seemed an unconquerable distance away. Soon it would be two months since I sailed from Panama. At such a rate it would take a year to get to Australia. According to my original timetable I should have been at least half across the Pacific. I would have to hurry now to outrun the hurricane season. Each day the prospect of constant trade winds pushing from behind became a brighter encouragement. Each day I found myself a little nearer them. Each day I sloughed off a few dragging miles.
With the noon sight of July 15, I pin-pointed myself at 1° south latitude and 85° west longitude; roughly 300 miles from the Galápagos. I hauled around to a course slightly south of west. From now on each day’s sailing counted for the maximum. At last I was making a steady course of west. Pagan became a happy boat. The logbook, nearly two-thirds filled, had its first optimistic entry “12:15 P.M. Turned finally west. I can smell the southeast trades!”
The cold Humboldt Current, diverted westward by Cape Pariñas on the South American western bulge, was now helping me along. The wind had shifted into the south; a fairer face was on the sea; and a set of comfortable circumstances set in that were almost mystic in their wondrousness.
After a month of beating back and forth to a destination that lay dead to windward, such sailing as this smacked of peculiarity. But I was making time, I was killing distance, it was wonderful. Three hundred miles on the bow lay the Galápagos, athwart the equator. For the first time I eased sheets a bit, watched the life line straighten out astern in the frothy wake, and sailed as one reads it is done in books and yachting magazines.
For the next few days, I felt not a squall; not a drop of rain; not a disordered cloud. It was so unearthly serene that the cats and I bedded down under the stars in the cockpit. Even lazy old Gawky roosted out with us. He had his special position on the lashed tiller, and we rode so smoothly over a halcyon sea that not even he could fall off a perch. We gave Stowaway the cabin to himself.
In the fleet time before sighting my first land, I hastened to finish the long letter I was writing to Mary. By this time it had grown to sixty-two pages on both sides. In it was every warm thought a young man could crowd, who was in process of transit to his love, as I was. It took every bit of sixty-two pages to say what I felt. . . .
I planned to mail it at Seymour Island, a fistlike outjutting on the north end of Indefatigable, where an army weather station was located. I intended to stop only a day or two—long enough to check over the gear, and have a night or two of soft sleep; then push off.
The last 300 miles to the Enchanted Isles I reeled off in less than four days. On the forenoon of July 19, Chatham Island reared herself above the sea as a dark shadow, one point on the port bow. The first landfall; the first leg of the trip over; 1000 miles of sea behind me; 7500 miles yet to go.