I FOUND TAGUS COVE an unusually snug protection—in fact ideal, except that there were no means to do the hull work. Not that Pagan was direly in need of it. But since I was planning a nonstop run to Sydney, I felt I wanted her clean before setting forth.
To the west of me lay more than 7000 miles of ocean. There were a little over two months before the hurricane season would set in. If I was to cross these waters in safe time, there could be no stop enroute. Therefore I esteemed it a saving in time to do the cleaning here, where I had a sufficient tide, and safe harbor such as Post Office Bay. And I could get Mary’s letter, in a manner of speaking, “on its way” by the antiquated postal system. So I resolved to beat around to Floreana the next day. But first I wanted to check the standing and running gear thoroughly.
I rigged a bosun’s chair to the main halyard and hoisted myself aloft. By midafternoon I had painted the thirty-five-foot mast and tightened the screws in her slide. In addition I had renewed all halyards, put up a new shroud, and painted the boom. I overhauled my main boom blocks and greased their reluctant shafts. I shifted the traveler and tried to fit it more securely, but to no avail. It had never been the same since the shark had torn it out, but it was serviceable.
By evening all was shipshape, not counting the hull and a few bits and pieces I could perform in my “off watch” hours at sea. The jaunty little cutter was straining at her tether, longing for a less peaceful element.
I had managed my time through the day with such circumspection as to even include catching a mess of fish for the cats and Gawky between chores. Gawky was getting so spoiled that he refused to go out and forage any more. But while we were anchored in the circular cove he flew out for a constitutional among the towering ledges, leaving the decks safe for Flotsam and Jetsam.
My cats, gorged and thoroughly at peace in dreams, lay curled in the folds of the mainsail. Occasionally they bestirred themselves and waddled back to their “pottie pot,” a sandbox I had built for them on the fantail. After, they would saunter, as though accidentally, upon the fish, and in a manner of saying, “Oh well, there’s nothing else to do,” they would gnaw languidly on each of the two varieties.
After this came experiments in luxurious ways of sleeping: they sprawled on the warm decks; they relaxed in the shade of the rail; or they wandered below to the cool of the forepeak. Those cats were rotten spoiled. Heaven help them if they should ever have to go back to civilized life and table scraps.
Though I wasn’t on a sightseeing tour, I was completely taken with the uniqueness of Tagus Cove. Why it isn’t a famous scenic spot I don’t know. It is roughly a hundred boat lengths across; shored in by precipitous cliffs. In its lofty seams, queer species of birds nest themselves and echo each other in a constant chorus. The cove is really the crater of a dead volcano with its seaward wall washed out.
Tagus is lonesome and mysterious. In her clear waters swim sharks, seals, mantas, sea lions, sting rays, sailfish, eels, and penguins. Yes, penguins. I saw a pair of them—and I have since been corroborated by a fisherman who has seen them there. They were smaller than ones I have seen in Capetown and the Falklands.
They swam beneath the keel, squirming with necks stretched, after fish. They bobbed up several times but were too busy to notice the new arrival in the cove.
Another attraction of Tagus is the arrangement of names painted in various positions over her riven surface. They run into dozens and reflect the ever-constant quest of adventure, long considered dead—and erroneously. I can remember, even yet, a score of them easily. It is obviously a tradition for boats visiting the archipelago to autograph, in some peculiar spot, the challenging walls of the cove.
I had promised people in Panama I would display Pagan’s name in bold hull white on a prominent ledge, and I set about finding an appropriate spot.
At the far end of the cove, on its northern rim, I saw a rocky platform, behind which appeared footing secure enough to wend up onto the high ledges. I climbed into my rubber raft and rowed over with the light metal oars. From the low ledge, shoaling sharply into the water, a young sea lion waddled and dived and watched me with eyes above the water in the same way people stare at foreigners. He didn’t appear frightened, in fact he climbed back onto the ledge close behind me, as, bucket and brush in hand, I began the ascent into the deformed lava clefts.
Well up, I came upon a flattened space. A few feet above it was the shapeless, barren terrain of the island. Towering over and away off to my right was a great lopped-off crater apparently burned out.
Looking back through the tight walls of the crevasse, I could see my little boat fetching snugly to her makeshift anchor. Like a peanut in a washtub, she was foil to the placid blue and gnarled varicolor of the cavernous walls.
From the corner of my eye I saw a jerking movement near my feet. A jagged spiny rock rolled over. With ghostlike mysteriousness it moved. It waddled smoothly over the rocks and then stopped as if in death. A great black eye stared blankly from its head held high, a notched tongue flicked from its jagged head. Suddenly, with the quickness of a cat, it turned and spat at me from a black mouth. The black tongue flicked again. It looked like a lizard, but more like a dragon; it was easily five feet long. It was spiny along the back, gruesomely wrinkled, had fingerlike hands and a long listless tail. It perched, not moving a muscle, glaring at me.
In all my life I had seen nothing like it. I could only remember what I had heard in Panama. Someone had said that in the Galápagos were “prehistoric species of animals.”
A man named Darwin had come here once and pronounced them “different.” Whatever it was he said they did, they did. I believe it; I was looking at one of the results. I wouldn’t have been surprised had this thing coughed fire—I would only have stumbled more clumsily than I did. For in confusion and bewilderment my step went awry and I fell all over myself; but mostly in the bucket of paint.
The very response to fear engendered fear; and I went slipping and falling down among the sharp volcanic boulders. I nearly landed aboard the sea lion as I ran out onto the ledge; in horror he hurtled himself into the soft water. In a fury of oar stroking I was beside Pagan and aboard.
No sooner on deck than the cove lost its appeal. The walls looked foreboding. What a place to be alone in! Even the cats sensed my uncertainty. They squatted in fuzzy balls, jerking their whiskers nervously.
The sun was behind Narborough; the cove was becoming a shadow; it was so still it shrieked. “To the devil with this place,” I said to the cats.
Then I saw it. Beneath the keel it went, a slimy, ghostlike shadow in the paling day. The same lizard or a creature similar . . . swimming! Its arms and legs were folded to its body much as you would hug yourself. It propelled itself solely with the long tail, in a wavy motion, and it slithered with the ease of a snake. That was enough for me.
I threw off the stops from the sails, hoisted them to the full, grappled the heavy anchor chain into a lump on deck, and dumped the clumsy wooden anchor atop it. As dark crowded close, I passed from the placid waters of the sinister cove to the piling whitecaps seaward. I pointed away from the mammoth volcano of Narborough, making for sea room to the south.
Dinner that night, potluck as usual, was a can of diced carrots, gulped wholesomely from the can. I ate at the tiller, steering by foot. Pagan danced on her tacks to southward. Within three hours, I estimated I had cleared Narborough to southward. I trimmed sails on the port tack and filled away close-hauled into the southwest on the long leg that would clear the lower western bulge of Albemarle.
The ponderous island lies like a dividing amoeba on the meridian of 91° west. I planned to tack around her in the night, so as to catch some “shut-eye” during the broad reach to Floreana the following day with tiller lashed and sails trimmed.
The morning sun, one hour high, found me well under Albemarle. Floreana, seemingly near but far away, was a gray hump forty miles on the starboard bow. I wanted to be fetched up to the anchor by dusk in Post Office Bay. There was a current to buck, and despite a nice wind it meant a day cram-full of work at the tiller, without sleep. I crowded on full sail and settled back for a day of “yachting” along the southern reaches of the Galápagos.
Late in the day, with the last of twilight to pilot myself into the quiet harbor, I rounded its northern point and opened up Post Office Bay.
This peaceful harbor is a crescent of water about a mile deep and the same width. To the left, as I came down its central road, lay a clump of islets. Ahead a sandy beach; slightly back of it an ugly disintegrating shack. A little way along resided the famous white barrel attached to a stake. Beyond the beach grew a motley array of scraggly barren bush, and the remnants of an ancient trail with which I wasn’t interested.
I dropped the hook fairly close in, and rowed ashore immediately. I hastened down the beach to the parched ornamental barrel, and inserted my bulky letter to Mary. Attached to it was a five-dollar bill by a rubber band. Five dollars from my small remaining funds was a lot; but I wanted Mary to get that letter, and if five dollars would insure it—and I felt it would—then the money didn’t matter. I stood by the traditional landmark for a moment wondering if the letter would ever reach Mary. Night was crowding in. Pagan was a blur in the water. I didn’t like it ashore here any more than at Tagus.
As I rowed out to Pagan I was oblivious to the dismal countenance of the surroundings or the growing cold. My mind was across the Pacific. It was also with the letter in the barrel. An unholy melancholy was on me. I was swept with the futile remorse of great desire, hindered by need of lengthy patience, and burdened by uncertainty.
I went to bed early, and silenced my quarrels with circumstances by a full night’s sleep, knowing that the next night would find me rushing “downhill” to westward.
Along about noon the following day my work was finished on Pagan’s hull. She lay careened on the short beach, partially shored up by a water cask. Her shapely hull was scraped free of marine growth and coated with the last of my boot topping. The slack tide was crawling up the planking. As the keel shifted uneasily on the hard bottom, I tested my kedge, and prayed that she would hold. In a few moments my boat was borne up, and she eased away to anchorage.
I hastily hanked on the jib and cleared all lines for the one-man scramble necessary to trim Pagan for departure. I took one final look around at the somber anchorage and turned peremptorily to my halyards and sheets, anchor line and tiller.